Well-Made Bed

Abby Frucht, a judge for this year’s Pen Faulkner Awards in Fiction, is a prize winning novelist and essayist who lives on a lake in Wisconsin, has raised two sons, worked as mentor and advisor for twenty years at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and counts her many friendships among women as one of the driving inspirations of her life. Laurie Alberts is the author of three previous novels, two memoirs, a story collection, and a book on the craft of writing. Her work has received the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Award, the Hackney Literary Award, an American Fiction prize, and a James Michener Award. She lives off the grid in Vermont.

“The novel deftly navigates between narrators, keeping its momentum even when jumping back and forth in time as the women—and the reader—discover a dark secret that's been hidden away for 15 years. The storyline hurtles forward at a steady pace, keeping the reader engaged and managing to answer questions while creating new ones. . . . an absorbing read. A weighty tale that keeps the reader intrigued and entranced.”—Kirkus Reviews“A Well-Made Bed depicts an eclectic, morally dubious collection of characters . . . (who) exhibit a wily, formidable strength as they scrape their way out of bad situations, making the best of the cards they’ve been dealt” —ShelfAwareness“Lovers of literary fiction will appreciate the fullness of the characters, the topsy-turvy plot twists, and the thought-provoking themes.” —Foreword Reviews“Frucht and Alberts construct a narrative that subverts genre conventions to effectively tell a new version of an old story, one with enough surprising prose to satisfy a wide variety of readers.” —Northwest Review of Books