2017 Beverly Hills Book Award Winner in New Fiction
2017 Beverly Hills Book Award Winner in Women's Fiction
2018 IBPA Ben Franklin Finalist in Best New Voices: Fiction
Becca Meister Fitzpatrick--wife, mother, grandmother, and pillar of the community--is the dutiful steward of her family's iconic summer tradition . . . until she discovers her recently deceased husband squandered their nest egg. As she struggles to accept that this is likely her last season in Long Harbor, Becca is inspired by her granddaughter's boldness in the face of impending single-motherhood, and summons the courage to reveal a secret she was forced to bury long ago: the existence of a daughter she gave up fifty years ago. The question now is how her other daughter, Rachel--with whom Becca has always had a strained relationship--will react. Eden is the account of the days leading up to the Fourth of July weekend, as Becca prepares to disclose her secret and her son and brothers conspire to put the estate on the market, interwoven with the century-old history of Becca's family--her parents' beginnings and ascent into affluence, and her mother's own secret struggles in the grand home her father named "Eden."
Blasberg, Jeanne McWilliams: - Jeanne Blasberg is an award-winning author and essayist. Her novel The Nine (SWP 2019) was honored with the Foreword Indies Gold Award in Thriller & Suspense and the Gold Medal and Juror's Choice in the National Indie Excellence Awards. Eden (SWP 2017), her debut, won the Benjamin Franklin Silver Award for Best New Voice in Fiction and was a finalist for the Sarton Women's Book Award for Historical Fiction. Her most recent novel, Daughter of a Promise (SWP 2024) is a modern retelling of the legend of David and Bathsheba, completing the thematic trilogy she began with Eden and The Nine.
Jeanne cochairs the board of the Boston Book Festival and serves on the Executive Committee of GrubStreet, one of the country's preeminent creative writing centers. Jeanne was named a Southampton Writers Conference BookEnds Fellow in April 2021. She reviews contemporary fiction for the
New York Journal of Books, When not in New England, she splits her time between Park City, UT, and growing organic vegetables in Verona, Wisconsin.
Blasberg, Jeanne: - Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg began her career on Wall Street and later worked in strategic planning at Federated Department Stores in Cincinnati before making her way to Boston, where she worked as a Research Associate at Harvard Business School.Writing case studies and business articles, however, couldn t satisfy her creative longings. Today, she is on the board of directors and is an avid student at Grub Street, one of the nation s preeminent creative writing centers, where she is hard at work on her next book.Jeanne and her husband split their time between Boston and Westerly, RI and have three grown children.When she s not writing, Jeanne can be found playing squash, skiing, or taking in the sunset over Little Narragansett Bay.
