Book Jacket Blurbs from the Promise of a Normal Life: A Novel

“Rebecca Kaiser Gibson writes with a poet’s precision and a novelist’s sense of character as she deftly evokes her narrator’s family, childhood summers, friendships, travels, and love affairs. The result is a radiant and transporting novel which carries the reader along with its wonderful sense of time and place.”

—Margot Livesey, New York Times bestselling author of The Boy in the Field

“Exquisitely written . . . The novel unfolds in a riveting series of experiences that interrogate womanhood, desire, religion, race, and privilege on the path to personal liberation. It is a novel that haunts through restraint.”

—Cleyvis Natera, author of Neruda on the Park

“The Promise of a Normal Life is a stunning story beautifully told. With themes of exile, loneliness, and family, it’s a book about the triumph of a human spirit and what we must sometimes go through to reach our destination and find our voice along the way.”

—Melissa Scholes Young, author of The Hive and Flood

“A liquid voice describes the tenuous journey of a young, unsure girl into womanhood. Each line is considered, tells a story unto itself. This is pure gold.”

—Andy Weinberger, author of the Amos Parisman Mystery Series

“A psychologically captivating tale . . . Rebecca Kaiser Gibson portrays one of the most interesting and fraught mother-daughter relationships in contemporary literature and offers insights into what it feels like to be left on one’s own to develop the scaffolding necessary to support a rich inner life.”

—Delia Kostner, PHD, psychoanalyst; faculty, Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute

“Rebecca Kaiser Gibson has delivered a novel to treasure.”

—Jonathan Wilson, author of A Palestine Affair