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THE BRIGHT YEARS

Sarah Damoff

A Novel

One family. Four generations. A secret son. A devastating addiction. A Texas family is met with losses and surprises of inheritance, but they're unable to shake the pull back toward each other in this big-hearted family saga perfect for readers of Mary Beth Keane and Claire Lombardo.

Ryan and Lillian Bright are deeply in love, recently married, and now 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 their marriage rise and fall.

When a shocking blow scatters their fragile trio, Georgette tries to distance herself from reminders of her parents. Years later, Lillian's son comes searching for his birth family, so Georgette must return to her roots, unearth her family's history, and decide whether she can open up to love for themor herselfwhile there's still time.

Told from three intimate points of view, The Bright Years is a tender, true-to-life novel that explores the impact of each generation in a family torn apart by tragedy but, over time, restored by the power of grace and love.

Sarah Damoff lives in Texas with her husband and children, where she is a social worker. Her work has appeared in Porter House Review, Ruminate Magazine, and Open Global Rights, among other publications. The Bright Years is her debut novel.

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Book Published 2025-04-22 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

This novel sparkles in its sentences, its texture, its big heartTHE BRIGHT YEARS is a vivid, forthright, and gorgeously written story of love in its many iterations.

Sarah Damoff's sprawling novel shows us that sometimes it's tough to tell the difference between what holds a family together and what tears it apart...she paints such a vivid atmosphere across all the years that it's tough not to imagine her story as a TV miniseries in the making. THE BRIGHT YEARS illuminates the razor-thin line between sabotaging and salvaging a family.

Like all great books, THE BRIGHT YEARS will leave you with deep feelings of compassion and insight for the inevitable love and suffering we must all go through in order to fully live.

This manner of storytelling felt so poignant, coming full circle at the end and tugging at your heart...I recommend it to fans of Mary Beth Keane and Claire Lombardo.

A dazzling, true-to-life depiction of adoration and damage, and the lovely ache of living as the pendulum swings between them.

In Damoff's heartfelt debut, which spans four generations, the impact of addiction is threaded tightly into a family's story. The novel examines the joys and sorrows of Lillian Bright and addresses a timeless theme: how alcohol decides what to destroy and what to leave alone.

It is so masterfully constructed and so sensitively, satisfyingly written that one finds it hard to believe it is a first novel. It contains all the realism of everyday life for millions of everyday people: passionate romance, betrayal, abandonment, survival and overcoming the odds. It's a family saga filled with heart and hope, pain and joy, love and grief.

Croatia (Stilus Knjiga); Czech Republic (Euromedia); Hungary (Libertine); Netherlands (LAB Publishers); Slovakia (Vydavatelstvo Tatran); Turkey (Ithaki Publishing); Ukraine (RM Books)

Social worker Damoff's heartfelt debut focuses on the impact of alcohol addiction on a family over four generations.This family drama rings true.

To attempt to tell a convincing love story at this late stage in the history of the novel is to set the bar ambitiously high, and yet Sarah Damoff somehow pulls it off twice in a single book, penning two thoroughly persuasive, interrelated relationship histories, each with appealing texture and depth, one believable because of the pain it captures, the other a balm in the hope it implies. THE BRIGHT YEARS builds symphonically, polyphonically, reaching emotional crescendos and gliding into perfectly calibrated decrescendos that mimic the rhythms of real life. In its nuanced understanding of the psyche and its unsparing realism about human limitations even in the face of our desperate attempts to overcome them, this book, when it opens its sails to gale-force winds of feeling, leads one to shed one's sophistication and openly root for love, to cheer for it, even shed a tear for it, as Damoff sticks the landing and at long last it comes.

In THE BRIGHT YEARS, Sarah Damoff paints a loving portrait of a Texas family shadowed by the power of addiction. The journeys of Lillian, Jet and Ryan Bright are in all ways tender, tragic and triumphant and left me rooting for each character until the very end. A beautiful debut.

Tender and heartbreaking, but ultimately hopeful. will make the reader feel like they are actually living through it alongside the characters.

THE BRIGHT YEARS is a moving portrait of inheritance and loss. A heart-breaker and heart-mender at once, this is a story that forces us to confront our vulnerabilities and secrets in order to find our strength and truth. A stunning debut.

Outstanding...through Damoff's beautiful, at times almost poetic narrative, we see hope through the darkness, and how loveand forgivenesscan make us whole.

Damoff's careful approach to depicting alcoholism, and her expressions of what it means to love (and be loved) amidst the wreckage of addiction, set this tender novel apart.

...builds symphonically, polyphonically, reaching emotional crescendos and gliding into perfectly calibrated decrescendos that mimic the rhythms of real life.

A Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist! An Instant USA Today Bestseller! An Apple Books Staff Pick for April A Book of the Month Add-On Pick One of Library Journal's Top Holds