THE BRIGHT YEARS, by Sarah Damoff, is a stunning debut novel about a family torn apart by alcoholism and tragedy and redeemed by love. It’s an unforgettable narrative and an unputdownable read.
THE BRIGHT YEARS
by Sarah Damoff
Simon & Schuster, April 2025
(via Dystel, Goderich & Bourret)
Ryan and Lillian Bright are madly in love, starting a business in Texas, and 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 her parents’ marriage fracture.
Kendi, a boy from their apartment complex, is one of the only people Georgette can count on, but when tragedy strikes, Georgette distances herself from both Ryan and Kendi as she tries to come to terms with her family’s past. When Lillian’s son surfaces looking for the mother that gave him away, Georgette begins unearthing her parents’ secrets and learning to find grace and love for herself.
Sarah Damoff lives with her husband and children in Dallas, where she is a social worker. She has a degree in Family Studies and a Child Protection Certification from Harvard University. A member of the Writers’ League of Texas, her work centers around family stories.
Claire “Mac” Woods—a professor enjoying her newfound hotshot status at an academic conference—finally has the acceptance and admiration she has long craved. But at the conference’s hotel bar, Mac is surprised to run into a face from a past she’d rather forget: the moneyed, effortlessly perfect Gwendolyn Whitney, Mac’s foil, rival, and former best friend. When Gwen moved to town in high school, Claire—then known as Mac, a poor kid from a troubled family who had too much on her plate—saw what it meant to have. Money, sophistication, culture, the very blueprints to success. Mac had almost nothing, except the will to change. Change she did, habitually grinding herself to work as hard as straight-A Gwen, even eventually getting admitted into the same elite graduate program as Gwen. But then Mac and Gwen become entangled with the department’s power-couple professors and compete head-to-head for a life changing fellowship. The more twisted the track toward success becomes, the more Mac has to contort herself to stay one step ahead—which deception signals the point of no return? Jack-knifing between Mac’s world-expanding graduate days and the crucible of the hotel and its unexpected guests, Bad Habits follows Mac’s reckoning between her hardscrabble past and tenuous present. What, exactly, did Mac do to get what she has today? And what will she do to keep it? With taut, powerful prose, Amy Gentry asks how far we’ll go to get what we want—and whether we can ever truly leave the past behind.
Sai, a happy-go-lucky tea shop owner, has a surprising gift: the ability to see red strings of fate, an invisible magic thread that connects two halves of one soul. While he loves helping people find their Fated Ones, he himself has a problem—his own string of fate is grey and fraying before his very eyes.