All her life Ellie Enderlin had been known as Lila’s sister—until the day Lila, a top math student at Stanford, was murdered, and the shape of their family changed forever. Twenty years later, Ellie is a professional coffee buyer who has never put down roots. When, in a chance meeting, she comes into possession of the notebook that Lila carried everywhere, Ellie returns home to finally discover the truth about her sister’s death—a search that will lead her to Lila’s secret lover, to the motives and fate of a man who profited from their family’s grief, and ultimately to the deepest secrets even sisters keep from each other. From the bestselling author of The Year of Fog (“Highly recommended [for fans of] authors like Jodi Picoult and Jacquelyn Mitchard.”—Library Journal [starred review]), this is a riveting family drama about loss, love, and the way hope redefines our lives—a novel at once heartbreaking, provocative, and impossible to put down.
Michelle Richmond grew up in Mobile, Alabama, earned her Bachelors degree from The University of Alabama, and after college lived in several Southern cities before attending the University Miami as a James Michener Fellow.
After receiving her MFA in Creative Writing in Miami, she lived in New York City for a couple of years before settling in San Francisco, where she has made her home ever since. Her first book, a collection of linked stories entitled THE GIRL IN THE FALL-AWAY DRESS, was published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2001. The collection is now available for Kindle. Her debut novel, DREAM OF THE BLUE ROOM, was published in 2003, followed by THE YEAR OF FOG (2007) and NO ONE YOU KNOW (2008).
THE YEAR OF FOG went on to become a New York Times bestseller, as well as a major bestseller in France, and to be published in ten languages, earning accolades from newspapers around the globe. Now in its 21st paperback printing, The Year of Fog is the 2011 selection of Silicon Valley Reads, which brings 15 Bay Area cities together to read one book.
Richmond has received the Hillsdale Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Associated Writing Programs Award, and the Mississippi Review Fiction Prize. Her stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Playboy, The Missouri Review, the Kenyon Review, Best American Fantasy, and many other magazines and anthologies. She is currently at work on her next novel, which will be publshed by Bantam in 2011.
From the author:
"For me, a novel always begins with a place and a character, and unfolds from there. My first two books, the linked story collection The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress and the novel Dream of the Blue Room, are rooted in the Southern landscape of my childhood. Without the place out of which they grew, those books would not exist.
Likewise, my subsequent books--The Year of Fog and No One You Know--could, in my mind, only take place in the San Francisco Bay Area. San Francisco has been my home for a decade. It's the place that fills my days and my imagination, and it inevitably finds its way into my novels. It's also the city in which I am raising my child, which, to me, makes it home.
Wherever you live, and whatever your geographical sensibilities may be, I imagine we share some literary sensibilities...and that a shared loved of storytelling is what brought you to this page. No One You Know is about storytelling, in much the same way that The Year of Fog is about memory. As for the next book, due out from Bantam next year, I'm trying not to talk about it too much. Call me superstitious, but I like to keep a story under wraps until the proofs are at the printer."
