THE BRIGHT YEARS
Available now in hardcover, audiobook, digital, and large print.
Paperback available for preorder.
One family. Four generations. A secret son. A devastating addiction. A big-hearted family saga about the enduring bonds of love.
Ryan and Lillian Bright are deeply in love, recently married, and now parents to a baby girl, Georgette. But Lillian has a son she hasn’t told Ryan about, and Ryan has an alcohol addiction he hasn’t told Lillian about, so Georgette comes of age watching their marriage rise and fall.
When a shocking blow scatters the fragile trio, Georgette tries to distance herself from reminders of her parents. Years later, Lillian’s son comes searching for his birth family, so Georgette must return to her roots, unearth her family’s history, and decide whether she can open up to love for them—or herself—while there’s still time.
Told from three intimate points of view, The Bright Years is a tender, true-to-life novel that explores the impact of each generation in a family torn apart by tragedy but, over time, restored by the power of grace and compassion.
“Time can wash dirt off a memory until it is revealed as something else entirely.”
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Praise for The Bright Years:
“Tender and heartbreaking, but ultimately hopeful…will make the reader feel like they are actually living through it alongside the characters.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Damoff’s moving prose reads like a held breath…This dazzling debut novel about a family forged from pain invites readers to consider the limits and possibilities of hope and love.” —Shelf Awareness (starred review)
“Damoff deftly guides us through a tale as big as Texas itself by focusing on what defines her characters and making us care about them. And, in her understated way, she paints such a vivid atmosphere across all the years that it’s tough not to imagine her story as a TV miniseries in the making. The Bright Years illuminates the razor-thin line between sabotaging and salvaging a family.” —Apple Books
“In Damoff’s heartfelt debut, which spans four generations, the impact of addiction is threaded tightly into a family’s story. The novel examines the joys and sorrows of Lillian Bright and addresses a timeless theme: how alcohol decides what to destroy and what to leave alone.” —People
"This novel sparkles in its sentences, its texture, its big heart—THE BRIGHT YEARS is a vivid, forthright, and gorgeously written story of love in its many iterations." —CLAIRE LOMBARDO, New York Times bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had and Same As It Ever Was
“THE BRIGHT YEARS is a moving portrait of inheritance and loss. A heart-breaker and heart-mender at once, this is a story that forces us to confront our vulnerabilities and secrets in order to find our strength and truth. A stunning debut!” —TAYARI JONES, New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage
“Not even experiences Damoff brings to the novel from her years as a social worker in the foster care system of Texas are what raises this novel from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Rather, it is the perfectly crafted prose, the tender insights into human nature that are dropped quietly onto page after page…Every word in The Bright Years feels pitch perfect. The novel is outstanding for its achingly accurate depiction of the effects of alcoholism on a family, for its fully fleshed-out characters, and for its poetic use of language. Each of these is true. Yet the overall impact of the novel is far greater than the sum of these parts. It’s hard to believe this is a debut novel for Damoff. We can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.” —Southern Literary Review
“Damoff’s careful approach to depicting alcoholism, and her expressions of what it means to love (and be loved) amidst the wreckage of addiction, set this tender novel apart.” —ELLE
“An excellent choice for book clubs or anyone seeking a story that celebrates connection and growth.” —Princeton Book Review
“The Bright Years is more than just a good novel. It is so masterfully constructed and so sensitively, satisfyingly written that one finds it hard to believe it is a first novel. It contains all the realism of everyday life for millions of people: passionate romance, betrayal, abandonment, survival and overcoming the odds. It’s a family saga filled with heart and hope, pain and joy, love and grief. And it makes you feel that you know these people, because you probably know people very much like them…Damoff is so clear-sighted, so full of understanding and humanity, that her readers, too, will surely feel a little less alone.” —The Dallas Morning News
“This family drama rings true.” —Publishers Weekly
“The writing is outstanding…Through Damoff’s beautiful, at times almost poetic narrative, we see hope through the darkness.” —BookReporter
“A gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, soul-searching, uplifting, and awe-inspiring rollercoaster of goodness…Damoff explores the dynamics of family, life, loss, and love seamlessly and with compassion.” —Southern Review of Books
“Like all great books, The Bright Years will leave you with deep feelings of compassion and insight for the inevitable love and suffering we must all go through in order to fully live.” —SIMON VAN BOOY, author of Sipsworth
“In THE BRIGHT YEARS, Sarah Damoff paints a loving portrait of a Texas family shadowed by the power of addiction. The journeys of Lillian, Jet and Ryan Bright are in all ways tender, tragic and triumphant and left me rooting for each character until the very end. A beautiful debut.” —AMANDA CHURCHILL, author of The Turtle House
“To attempt to tell a convincing love story at this late stage in the history of the novel is to set the bar ambitiously high, and yet Sarah Damoff somehow pulls it off twice in a single book, delivering two thoroughly persuasive, interrelated relationship histories, each with appealing texture and depth, one believable because of the pain it captures, the other a balm in the hope it implies. The Bright Years builds symphonically, polyphonically, reaching emotional crescendos and gliding into perfectly calibrated decrescendos that mimic the rhythms of real life. This ever-expanding family redefines itself at every turn, taking on people like a lifeboat saving souls, and one invests oneself in every turn these combined fates take. In its nuanced understanding of the psyche and its unsparing realism about human limitations even in the face of our desperate attempts to overcome them, this book, when it opens its sails to gale forces of feeling, leads one to shed one’s sophistication and openly root for love, to cheer for it, to even shed a tear for it, as Damoff sticks the landing and at long last it comes.” —MATTHEW THOMAS, New York Times-bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves