About the Book
Gwen Rivlin moves back home to Philadelphia in the wake of her mother’s death, and into the big, shabby house with a turret where they both grew up. Her friends tell her it’s too expensive for a 27-year-old theater director, and too suburban if she has any hopes of keeping her social life alive.
Gwen is determined to stay, even when her schemes to make the house more affordable run afoul of the single-family zoning laws and earn the disapproval of her neighbors. To smooth things over, and to assuage her own grief, Gwen stages a production of The Cherry Orchard inside the turret house. She casts friends, coworkers from the local coffee shop, and various community members in Anton Chekhov’s play about a family struggling to hold onto its own real estate.
Through the creation of this beautiful and transitory work of art, Gwen heals old breaches, reevaluates her relationship with her difficult mother, and weaves a new, non-traditional family for herself.
Praise for We’re So Lucky to Live Here
A sensitive exploration of the power of place and the importance of creativity and community in a time of grief.
―Kirkus Reviews
Rachel Pastan writes with the energy of a sociologist and the soul of a poet. This is a novel about grief transmuted into art, about the families we assemble when the ones we’re born into prove insufficient, and about how a house can be both a burden and a sanctuary. Moving, funny, and wise.
―Christina Baker Kline, New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train
{We’re So Lucky to Live Here beautifully explores overlapping ideas of community, loss, memory, and change. Rachel Pastan’s novel is both an intimate, compelling mother-daughter story and a broader, sharp-eyed look at the ways in which people live now––or try to live. This is a highly enjoyable, observant, memorable book.
―Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings
I love novels about old houses, and novels about mothers and daughters, and novels about grief and its wily ways. Rachel Pastan’s warm and lovely new book gives us all three and makes the joining of these themes feel both fresh and inevitable. A beautiful novel by a wonderful writer.
―Ann Packer, author of Some Bright Nowhere
We’re So Lucky to Live Here is a love letter to literature, theater, mothers and the many places we call home. It’s also one of the truest portraits of grief I’ve ever read.
―Daisy Alpert Florin, author of My Last Innocent Year
We’re so lucky to have We’re So Lucky to Live Here, a gorgeous novel about love and grief, about literature and life, about community and independence. How do we say good-bye to those we love, and wrestle all our prickly, long-held resentments? This unputdownable novel shows Pastan at the peak of her considerable powers.
―Susan Scarf Merrell, author of Shirley
About the Author
Rachel Pastan’s novel, In the Field, based on the life of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, won the inaugural Science + Literature award from the National Book Foundation in 2022. She has also published three other novels: Alena, Lady of the Snakes, and This Side of Married. She is the literary director of Celia Bookshop in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and former chair of Swarthmore’s housing affordability task force.
Author website: www.rachelpastan.com
Author social media: www.instagram.com/rpastan
Author photo credit: Andy Shelter