We're So Lucky to Live Here

Rachel Pastan’s novel, Inthe Field, based on the life ofNobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, won the inaugural Science +Literature award from the National Book Foundation in 2022. She has alsopublished three other novels: Alena, Ladyof the Snakes, and This Side of Married. She is the literary director of CeliaBookshop in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and former chair of Swarthmore’s housingaffordability task force.

Praise for We're So Lucky to Live Here“moving. . . poignant. . . the novel builds to a surprising conclusion. Pastan sticks the landing in this inspired offering.” —Publishers Weekly"A sensitive exploration of the power of place and the importance of creativity and community in a time of grief.”—Kirkus Reviews"What do you do when your mother dies and leaves you a beautiful house you can’t afford, in a town that’s becoming unrecognizable? In Rachel Pastan’s We’re So Lucky to Live Here, Gwen Rivlin fills the house with strays and stages The Cherry Orchard in the living room. Moving between Gwen’s adolescence and her fraught, complicated present, 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, #1 NYT Bestselling author of Orphan Train and The Foursome"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 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 ShirleyPRAISE FOR RACHEL PASTANIn the Field: “The novel, sensual, stirring, suspenseful...a story splendidly imagined, but with all the dimension and complexity that comes from the author's original fascination and respect for the real-life character."—Los Angeles Review of Books"Rachel Pastan has written a compelling and compulsively readable tale about a complex woman's path to success in biological science, showing us, through subtle social conflicts and in lucid evocative prose, the difficulties of entering any field as an unconventional, impassioned participant."—Harold Varmus, Lewis Thomas University Professor, Weill Cornell Medicine; Nobel Laureate in Physiology or MedicineAlena: “Creepy and entrancing.” —John Irving, author Queen Esther“Alena is so eerie and elegantly suspenseful that I could see myself rereading it…every few years.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air“A brilliant takedown of the self-serious art world. —The New York Times Book ReviewLady of the Snakes: “A marvelous, fearless book.” —Ann Packer, author of Some Bright Nowhere“The perfect summer book.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh AirThis Side of Married: “A wedding bouquet of great wit and affection.” —Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings