Dear Friends,
I’m excited to share that my second novel, SURRENDER, will soon be in bookstores near you. Well, not that soon, it comes out in April, but you can pre-order now. I love pre-ordering because it makes me feel organized, and then when the book arrives in the mail it’s a lovely little gift from my past self, because inevitably I have forgotten that I bought it. So give a gift to your future self!
But maybe you want to know what the book is about? This is a novel about midlife crises, disruption, losing and finding love, female friendships, and following your passions. The book centers on Lucy, who moves back to rural Massachusetts after a successful career in PR in New York City to resurrect her father’s farm. She encounters difficulties from all sides, but is determined to raise dairy goats and save the land from developers. Lucy has returned to her childhood home with Michael, her husband of twenty years, but as his health begins to decline and he squanders all their savings, Lucy finds solace in Sandy, a girlhood companion, who quickly becomes more than a friend. Every day for Lucy is one of difficult decisions.
Advanced reader copies have arrived!
I wrote this book in the wake of the death of my father, a lifelong farmer, when I was mourning not only him but the loss of the land I grew up on. I wanted to imagine a character firmly rooted in the soil and a rural community. All to say, there’s a lot of love poured into this book, and I hope you love reading it as much as I thrilled to its creation.
Here are the kind words of some writers who have enjoyed SURRENDER so far:
Jennifer Acker’s splendid new novel “Surrender” provides what I crave from all stories: vividly drawn characters worth spending time with, a richly rendered place for them to inhabit, and the kinds of impossible choices that the real world too often offers all of us.
—Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls and the North Bath “Fool” novels.
I loved this glorious and immensely affecting portrait of a farmer's life, in which her devotion to her partner, community, and land confronts the challenges of commerce and aging. “Surrender” is a novel with a beating heart.
—Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning
Mirroring the rural New England landscape, Acker creates stark beauty in placing the extremes of life side-by-side: hardship by ease, comfort by pain, destruction by growth, new by old—leaving us with a deeply compelling narrative and a finely etched portrait of a person finding her way. Acker's astounding clarity and ambition reach from the complexity of making impossible decisions to the specific hardships and miracles of farming. It's a timeless book, of timeless struggles and timeless hope.
—Ben Shattuck, author of The History of Sound
Thank you so much for pre-ordering and supporting this book! Here are the links again: Bookshop and Amazon.
I look forward to being in touch in the coming months and can’t wait to see as many of you as possible at events. If you have ideas for real world happenings, I’d love to hear them!
Yours,
Jen
@jen_acker
PS: You are receiving this message because we’ve been in touch about literary things in the past, or you are related to me. Apologies if you have received this in error!