Heartbroken is the story of three women, strangers, on a heart-wrenching collision course none of them could have seen coming.

Early reviews are unanimous in their praise, calling Heartbroken “one of Lisa Unger’s best novels yet” (Library Journal).

Booklist gives it a starred review: “Unger delivers compelling, fully drawn characters while at the same time putting the thrill in thriller. A first-class page-turner.”

And another starred review from Publishers Weekly: “[A] tense psychological thriller. . . . Unger skillfully builds the fissures of each of [her characters’] lives as she illustrates the power of the heart and the corrosive nature of lies.”

Heartbroken will keep you turning pages late into the night. Good luck, all!

In the meantime, enjoy this downloadable excerpt of Heartbroken by Lisa Unger.

Heartbroken by Lisa Unger – Excerpt


LISA UNGER is an award-winning New York Times and international bestselling author. Her novels have sold over 1 million copies in the U.S. and have been translated into 26 different languages. Her new novel, Heartbroken, will be available from Crown Publishing wherever books are sold June 26, 2012.

On a raw night in February, I ordered a peppermint tea in a bright Greenwich Village diner and unwrapped a bound galley of my book, Apron Anxiety.

It was the first time I saw how everything came together – from the cover selection, to the blurbs on the back, to my 80,000–something words. Oh, those words! The words that were my core being for an entire year straight! Just touching the pages was surreal. I started to cry.

And then I laughed. Because as I read the story, as a girl sitting in a diner, not an author wrestling with “her art,” this cool-looking paperback was actually funny and touching! I sailed through the first chapters, oblivious to anything around me, but absolutely beaming.

That’s when it hit me. I loved my book. If anybody thought otherwise – and of course, some would – that was his or her business. But I was really proud of it, comfortable with it. And moving forward, that has made all the difference.

I thought of this recently when asked if I get nervous cooking for other people, another action that begs judgment and criticism. Turns out, just like writing, if I make food that I like and believe in, I’m totally fine with whatever happens.

Last week, I had to feed 15 friends, including a journalist who was reporting on my cooking skills. Just as everyone sat down, I realized that I burnt my heirloom carrots, which I worked so hard to find in purple and now were . . . black.

As I brought the platter to the table, I pushed back my hair, brightened my eyes, and presented my crispy mistake with love: “These look perfect.”

ALYSSA SHELASKY is the New York editor of Grub Street at New York magazine, as well as the creator of the blog Apron Anxiety. She has written for numerous publications including People, Us Weekly, Hamptons Style, Gotham, Self, Blackbook, TV Guide, The New York Post, New York magazine, CBS’s Watch magazine, and Glamour magazine.

Visit Alyssa online at ApronAnxiety.com and on Twitter @apronanxiety.

RIFers! We want to hear your thoughts – answer the questions below. The cool thing about this poll is that it allows you to create your own question!

RIFers, Bookworms, and Foodies

Kristen Iversen: Rocky Flats was the big secret of my childhood. No one knew what they did at the plant; the rumor in the neighborhood was that they made household cleaning products. We knew nothing about radioactive and toxic contamination.

My childhood was also shadowed by the secrecy surrounding my father’s alcoholism. My family was very close and loving but also troubled. I wrote the book to learn what really happened at Rocky Flats, to learn everything I could about plutonium pits and nuclear weapons and the crucial role the plant played during and after the Cold War.

I also wanted to understand my family and the broader context of what it meant to grow up during the seventies. Secrecy at the level of the community and at the level of family turned out to be a central theme in the book.

One of the great ironies of my life is that I spent several years as a travel writer in Europe, looking for good stories to write about, and the biggest story turned out to be – quite literally – in my own backyard. My family and our neighbors were “Cold War warriors,” as the plutonium workers themselves were called, but no one told us.

RIF: How is Rocky Flats a global issue?

KI: The 2011 accident at Fukushima, following the tsunami, reminded the world in a terrible way that we cannot ignore the threat of radioactive contamination, whether it comes from nuclear power plants or nuclear weapons sites.

The world has experienced many nuclear disasters in recent years, including accidents at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, the Mayak facility in Russia (the “sister” plant to Rocky Flats), Rocky Flats in Colorado, and other former nuclear weapons sites around the United States such as Hanford and Fernald.

The health effects of short-term, high-level radioactive contamination are fairly well known. What are the health costs of long-term, low-level radioactive exposure? Scientists and physicists continue to debate the topic, but one fact is for sure: there is no safe level of exposure to plutonium. One millionth of a gram, particularly if it is inhaled, can cause cancer.

Rocky Flats happened in my backyard, but in a sense it is happening in everyone’s back yard. Many of us live in close proximity to former nuclear weapons sites or nuclear power plants with inadequate safety provisions. And, at a time when we are supposed to be decreasing our nuclear arsenal, the U.S. government is talking about producing nuclear triggers again. We need to pay attention.

RIF: Was it hard to write so intimately about your family?

KI: I believe that the most powerful way to tell a story is through personal, everyday experience. Every person on the planet has a story that is both ordinary and extraordinary. My siblings and I swam in the lake behind our house and rode our horses in the fields. We had, in many ways, a blessed childhood. And this kind of experience is one that many readers will share.

What makes our story unique is that it connects, in ways that we never anticipated, to a broader historical and political narrative. The story of the 1969 fire at Rocky Flats – which very nearly destroyed the entire metro Denver area – is all the more powerful when you realize that my family was having a very pleasant Mother’s Day brunch at a nearby restaurant. We had no idea what was going on – and neither did other Coloradoans.

It was only by including the experiences of me, my family, my neighbors, and my coworkers at Rocky Flats that I could truly bring the story to life. It was indeed a challenge to write intimately about things that, as a family, we were never supposed to discuss, including my father’s drinking. And yet the end result was a tremendous sense of clarity and understanding.

RIF: What surprised you most during your research for the book?

KI: I was surprised, and continue to be surprised, by the secrecy surrounding this very dramatic story. What happened at Rocky Flats, during the Cold War and up to the present moment, is crucially important not only to Colorado but to the entire country. But so much of the story has been hidden over the years, and now it is in danger of being forgotten.

Recently I stayed at a hotel just a few miles from the Rocky Flats site, and the young man at the front desk had grown up in Colorado. He’d never heard of Rocky Flats. Of those people who do know the story – or part of it – many believe that Rocky Flats is old history, that it’s irrelevant and insignificant. They believe the land is safe and the story is over. After all, you can’t see or smell plutonium.

Yet we cannot forget the story of Rocky Flats. The effects will linger far into the future.

There were many other surprises too. During my research, I was shocked to discover how many tons of MUF, or “Missing Unaccounted For” plutonium, were missing, even to the present day. And the history of the 1989 FBI raid on Rocky Flats is fascinating. I believe it’s the only time in the history of the United States that two government agencies – the FBI and the EPA – have raided another agency, the Department of Energy.

RIF: For people who want to know more about the hazards of former nuclear weapons sites and nuclear power on our environment, where should they go? How can they get involved?

KI: Two excellent sources of information regarding nuclear issues are the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (www. thebulletin.org) and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. For news about Rocky Flats, an organization called Nuclear Guardianship is a good source regarding past and ongoing issues. The U.S. Department of Energy also maintains a website on Rocky Flats.

KRISTEN IVERSEN grew up in Arvada, Colorado, near the Rocky Flats nuclear weaponry facility and received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Denver. She is director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Memphis and editor-in-chief of The Pinch, an award-winning literary journal. During the summers, she serves on the faculty of the MFA Low-Residency Program at the University of New Orleans, held in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is also the author of Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth, winner of the Colorado Book Award for Biography and the Barbara Sudler Award for Nonfiction. Iversen has two sons and lives in Memphis.

Visit Kristen online at KristenIversen.com and on Facebook and Twitter @KristenIversen.

In terms of casualties, the U.S. and U.K. apart, the Afghan theater has seen Canada’s highest combat casualties since the Korean War; Australia’s highest combat casualties since Vietnam; France’s highest combat casualties since Algeria; the highest combat casualties for Germany, Italy, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden since World War II; the highest combat casualties for the Netherlands since the Dutch withdrew from Indonesia in 1949; the highest combat fatalities for Spain since the Ifni War in Morocco in 1958; and the highest combat casualties for Poland in a foreign war since World War II. As for Afghan civilian and military casualties, we have no definite numbers.

When I set out to write The Watch, I wanted to give voice to the statistics, especially those counted as collateral damage in our foreign wars of choice. I decided to tell the story of one brave and representative young Afghan woman who refuses to yield her right to bury the body of her brother killed during a battle with an American combat company.

In modeling my Pashtun protagonist explicitly on Sophocles’ Antigone, I introduced a figure from Greek tragic drama – perhaps its purest figure – in order to enable you to feel her sorrow, sorrow of a magnitude to which we’ve become immunized, despite our best intentions, in an age of the ceaseless warfare.

What lends Greek tragedy its intensity is the importance it attaches to human dignity and honor. Modern technology has unrecognizably altered warfare from Sophocles’ time: our combat casualties are smuggled in during the dead of night, our enemy charred to cinders by unmanned drones. The Watch is both a restoration of what we have lost and a tribute to one woman’s moral courage. I want you to think about her wild and bracing constancy of spirit and her incomparable will as a reminder of the caliber of people we collectively label our enemies.

And here is where my story of writing the book takes a surprising turn.

Once I had a draft manuscript, I sought out U.S. service members who’d served in Afghanistan to check my facts. To my astonishment, they greeted my endeavor with profound support and thanked me for remembering their service in a distant, hostile land. At first, it confounded me but then, consider only this: To date, St. Louis is the only U.S. city to have honored Afghan and Iraq War veterans with a homecoming parade.

As a result, what has come out of writing this book, for me, has been an unprecedented series of deep and moving friendships with my readers in the U.S. military, and a new desire to tell their side of the story as well as faithfully as a work of fiction can communicate spirit and soul.

I hope with all my heart that you will join me in spreading the word.

JOYDEEP ROY-BHATTACHARYA was born in Jamshedpur, India, and educated in politics and philosophy at Calcutta University and the University of Pennsylvania. His novels, The Gabriel Club and The Storyteller of Marrakesh, have been published in 11 languages in 16 countries. The Watch will be available from Hogarth wherever books are sold on June 5, 2012.


Join readers on Goodreads to discuss The Watch, the first major novel about the Afghanistan War. And check back here on RIF for upcoming Reader Reviews of The Watch and the three other novels we shared in our recent Hogarth limited edition set giveaway.

RIFers! We want to hear your thoughts – take the poll below and create your own question.

Truth, Fiction, and War

“I cannot say this urgently enough: you have to read Gone Girl. It’s as if Gillian Flynn has mixed us a martini using battery acid instead of vermouth and somehow managed to make it taste really, really good. Gone Girl is delicious and intoxicating and delightfully poisonous.”
–Scott Smith, New York Times bestselling author of The Ruins and A Simple Plan

Marriage can be a real killer. One of the most critically acclaimed suspense writers of our time, New York Times bestseller Gillian Flynn, takes that statement to its darkest place in this unputdownable masterpiece about a marriage gone terribly, terribly wrong. As The Washington Post proclaimed, her work “draws you in and keeps you reading with the force of a pure but nasty addiction.” Gone Girl’s toxic mix of sharp-edged wit with deliciously chilling prose creates a nerve-fraying thriller that confounds you at every turn.

On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick Dunne’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River. Husband-of-the-Year Nick Dunne isn’t doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife’s head, but hearing from Amy through flashbacks in her diary reveal the perky perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media—as well as Amy’s fiercely doting parents – the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he’s definitely bitter – but is he really a killer? As the cops close in, every couple in town is soon wondering how well they know the one that they love. With his twin sister Margo at his side, Nick stands by his innocence. Trouble is, if Nick didn’t do it, where is that beautiful wife? And what was left in that silvery gift box hidden in the back of her bedroom closet?

Employing her trademark razor-sharp writing and assured psychological insight, Gillian Flynn delivers a fast-paced, devilishly dark, and ingeniously plotted thriller that confirms her status as one of the hottest writers around.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn – Excerpt


GILLIAN FLYNN’s debut novel, Sharp Objects, was an Edgar Award finalist and the winner of two of Britain’s Dagger Awards. She lives in Chicago with her husband, Brett Nolan, and a rather giant cat named Roy. Gone Girl will be available wherever books are sold June 5, 2012.







RIFers, exciting news: Gillian Flynn has agreed to be a Guest Editor of RIF! She’ll curate several sections, bringing her distinctly brilliant and sharp-witted voice to our pages. Watch for her in the coming weeks!

When I was twenty-five and a half, I quit a perfectly good job as a reporter in rural Idaho, stuffed everything I possibly could into two body-sized duffel bags, and flew out New York City on a ticket in my brother’s name. (This was the mid-90s, long before airport security, and I had a total of $2,000 in savings.)

Though I didn’t have a job or a place to live, moving to New York thrilled me. Here was a place that indefinitely prolonged the period of disorientation, of exploration, of personal reinvention.

This spring, I’ve been reminded of that time in my life while re-reading Siri Hustvedt’s extraordinary novel, The Blindfold, with a group of freshmen I teach. The narrator, a Columbia graduate student named Iris, coolly relates her adventures over the course of her first two or so years in the city.

Iris works briefly for a man who asks her to tape record intricate descriptions of quotidian object (a dirty glove, a used cotton ball, a mirror) that belonged to a young woman who was murdered in his building.

She poses for a friend who takes a picture that she finds so disturbing that she winds up disavowing her identity when strangers approach and ask whether she is, indeed, that girl in the photograph.

Finally, she begins to dress like a man and wander the city streets at night, protected by her new masculine identity. “[I]n the city it was easy to change my name,” Iris observes, “to be someone else.”

Of course, not all of my students like this book. They find Iris weird, they think she has terrible taste in men, and they’re skeptical of the notion you can slip identities on and off as easily as men’s suits.

To me, however, The Blindfold, is not only a dizzying exploration of what happens when your faith in the big fundamentals (the fixed nature of the self and the stability of language) gets chipped away, but it’s also a tribute to certain slivers of time when anything seems possible and that freedom thrills.

My first two years in New York were not nearly as dramatic as Iris’s, but I did reinvent myself on a weekly and sometimes daily basis: Was I a girl from Idaho, a place as exotic as Tahiti to most urbanites, or an Amherst English major? Was I Rhodes Scholar or a temp? Would I continue being a competitive runner or would I start hanging out in wine bars (the epitome of sophistication to that younger self)?

It’s nice to have choices. Our culture also certainly rewards those who make the right choices and stick with them. But it can be equally important to stand before all those choices and not choose (itself a kind of choice, I know) if only to understand that the way forward is not, and need not be, so clear.

That’s what I love about The Blindfold, and that’s what I’ve tried to capture in some small way in my collection of interconnected stories, The Kissing List.

STEPHANIE REENTS’s fiction has been included in the O. Henry Prize Stories, noted in Best American Short Stories, and has appeared in numerous journals. Stephanie has been a Bread Loaf Conference Scholar, a Stegner Fellow, and a Rhodes Scholar. She is an assistant professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. The Kissing List will be available from Hogarth wherever books are sold on May 22, 2012.

First there were the words of Doctor Seuss, whose Green Eggs and Ham and Cat in the Hat started me on a love of reading that continues to this day.

Next was a collection of twenty-some volumes – my father’s Encyclopedia Britannica, which introduced me to the breadth of knowledge in the world. Where else could I have learned about armadillos, armor, spacecraft, steamships, dinosaurs, domiciles, and zebras? I’m sad to think that wonder of the print world is about to vanish after 240 years of continuous publication, though it will continue online.

As I became a teenager, I entered a period where I read more for entertainment than knowledge. I devoured the novels of Rex Stout and Graham Greene and discovered science fiction like Larry Niven’s Ringworld and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. James Clavell’s Tai-Pan and Shogun stories got me through several rainy weekends, and I thought of them as I watched ships inbound from Asia in Boston Harbor.

The Millionaire Next Door came out in 1996, just as I was moving my automobile business to its present location in Springfield, Massachusetts. Tom Stanley’s insights totally reshaped how I saw work, myself, and the worth of my labors. Its messages – including the fact that most millionaires are ordinary small business people, not fancy corporate executives – are just as meaningful today as they were then.

A short while later, I learned about my own mind and how I differ from most other people by reading Dr. Tony Attwood’s Asperger’s Syndrome. His explanations of how people on the autism spectrum see the world transformed my life as much as anything before or since. Even now, I could not recommend a better first book for someone learning about Asperger’s syndrome.

A few years after that, my brother Augusten took up the book writing trade. When his second book, Running with Scissors, came along, I was almost afraid to show it to friends or clients at my company. After growing up in an abusive and dysfunctional home, I had worked hard to conceal the less savory aspects of my youth. With no warning, my brother put it all out there for the world to see, and I was terrified. Would I have any friends left after they read his account of our childhood?

To my amazement, friends and clients alike embraced his story. Instead of reacting with horror, they showed warmth, compassion, and a sense of wonder that we’d both turned out so well. The acceptance of RWS helped free me of the shame of my past, and set me on the track that led to my own memoir, Look Me in the Eye.

Most recently, I’ve enjoyed the controversial new book from Charles Murray, Coming Apart. I’m always fascinated by sociological studies and this one gave me a lot to ponder.

Before that, I enjoyed Donovan Hohn’s Moby Duck: The True Story of 28,000 Bath Toys Lost at Sea, which led me to spend several evenings researching drift, ocean currents, and manufacturing in China. The story made me want to cast away my own message in a bottle, but I’m nowhere near an ocean at this moment.

Tonight I’m partway through William Broad’s The Science of Yoga. I was interested in this book because my wife has gained great benefit from yoga, and I’m hoping to find out why in its pages.

Like everyone else, I read Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, and I followed that by re-reading Bukowski’s timeless novel, Post Office. Of the leading characters in these two books, I have to say that Bukowski’s drunk, lecherous, and mostly autobiographical mailman was by far the more sympathetic and entertaining. Jobs may have been a wonderful visionary and tremendously successful, but he wasn’t very likeable at all. It just goes to show that nice guys can still finish last, in fiction and in real life.

What will I read tomorrow? Whatever catches my eye at our local bookseller, I suppose. I’m lucky to live in a college town, where books are still treasured and dogs run free in the yard.

JOHN ELDER ROBISON lives with his wife and son in Amherst, Massachusetts. His company, J E Robison Service, repairs and restores fine European automobiles.

Visit John online at JohnRobison.com, on his blog, and on Goodreads, Facebook and Twitter @johnrobison.

Heartbreaking and hilarious, Signs of Life features a powerful, wholly original debut voice that will have you crying and laughing to the very last page.

RIFers in book groups! Signs of Life is a terrific book group book, which is why it’s a selection of the Ladies Home Journal Book Club.

Don’t miss the bonus material for Signs of Life that will help make your book group discussion lively and rewarding: a letter from author Natalie Taylor and discussion questions for Signs of Life.

Signs of Life by Natalie Taylor – Excerpt with Readers Guide


NATALIE TAYLOR and her son, Kai Taylor, live in Royal Oak, Michigan. Natalie teaches high school English and recently earned her master’s degree in Education. Kai is working on his numbers, letters, and colors.

Visit Natalie online at AuthorNatalieTaylor.com, on Facebook, on Twitter @MyHouseIsAMess, and on her blog.


In March 2011, we shared copies of Signs of Life in a giveaway on Read It Forward Facebook. Were you a lucky winner? If so, we want to hear from you – leave a comment below with your RIFer Reader Review. If we feature your review here on RIF.com, we’ll send you another fabulous book!

Newly launched in the U.S., Hogarth will publish the kind of fiction that people will be talking about 100 years from now: contemporary, voice-driven, character-rich, eclectic, adventurous, provocative, vividly written.

I Am Forbidden is all those things and more. With a starred review in Publishers Weekly and rave early reviews from celebrated authors, it’s one to watch this spring. We’re thrilled to share advance reader’s copies with you, making the Read It Forward community among the first readers to enjoy this fantastic novel.

Forbidden Reading
by Anouk Markovits

In my ultra-Orthodox, Hasidic childhood, secular books were forbidden. I would often volunteer to do the grocery shopping for my large family, so that a few centimes could find their way into my pocket, then I would sneak into the storefront lending library on the rue des Orfèvres. I would select volumes by size because borrowing a fat book cost the same as borrowing a thin book. I would hide the books on my body beneath my clothes and read them at night by flashlight.

Walking by bookstores, I would glance through the window at the covers, wondering if I would ever be able to buy a newly published title. I was an adult before I bought my first book of contemporary fiction and I remember my sense of triumph when I saved up enough money to buy the full 9-volume French dictionary, Le Grand Robert.

I Am Forbidden is my first novel in English and the first time I have written about the world of Jewish fundamentalism in which I was raised.

Books set in fundamentalist environments generally feature protagonists who leave or struggle to leave. I wanted to try to write about those who stay. This meant writing a novel rather than an essay or a memoir because a novel would permit me to journey into characters whose beliefs and choices were not my own.

I tried to write about the Hasidic world on its own terms, but in the end the genre of the novel intrinsically opposes all fundamentalisms; the multiple, conflicting perspectives that a novel requires are precisely what fundamentalism forbids.

In the Hasidic world I come from, we were not to speak of life inside to people on the outside. And women were not to speak in public at all. So I do not take for granted this opportunity to have my novel published and to be part of communities like Read It Forward that give voice to writers and readers, in support of a world where people are free to select any book they choose.

ANOUK MARKOVITS grew up in France. She attended a religious seminary in England instead of high school. After she left home at the age of nineteen to avoid an arranged marriage, she attended Columbia University. She has a Master of Architecture from Harvard and a PhD in Romance Studies from Cornell. She has worked as an architect and as a set designer on major films including The Unbearable Lightness of Being. She lives in New York. Her first novel, Pur Coton, was written in French. I Am Forbidden is her English-language debut and will be available wherever books are sold on May 8, 2012.