FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(Minneapolis, January 1, 1999) Our Sometime Sister, a novel by Norah Labiner, finalist for the 1998 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award.

In this dazzling debut, Norah Labiner links the seemingly disparate worlds of suburban eighties America and Shakespeare’s Court of Denmark, weaving a novel within a novel about female identity, stories, and fate that redefines the possibilities of fiction.

Writing her first novel, twenty-five-year-old narrator Pearl Christomo addresses notions of naming, ghosts, and tragedy to fill an emptiness she sees previous writers have proscribed to women. Along the way, she discovers how the plots, details, and characters of the fiction mirror her own story. Labiner has written a fascinating book about stories, how we tell them, and how they tell us.

Growing up with an elusive ghost-like father and raised in urban Michigan by a mother always searching for something outside her reach, Pearl chooses to exile herself to a private school in the isolated Upper Peninsula. Once there, Pearl begins a novel, discovering that her characters-Hugh Denmark, a boozy old writer; Aaron and Rose, the not-so-perfect couple; Theresa, an actress; Theresa’s younger sister Mary Clare and her know-it-all friend Butternut-come to resemble the players in her own life. Eventually the boundaries between the two narratives intersect so that the limits of fiction, dream, and memory are lost.

Our Sometime Sister was elected to the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program after it was published in 1998. Labiner was named one of the "New Faces of Fiction" by Utne Reader, and Our Sometime Sister has received glowing reviews from Publishers Weekly, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and City Pages. Our Sometime Sister is now a finalist for the Discover Award, which was established in 1993 to celebrate the work of a first time American novelist whose work has appeared in the Discover Great New Writers program during the year. The award is decided by a jury panel made up of three distinguished authors. This year’s panel consists of Sandra Ben’tez, author of A Place Where the Sea Remembers and Bitter Grounds; Katherine Weber, teacher of creative writing at Yale University and the author of the New York Times notable book Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear and the upcoming The Music Lesson; and Oscar Hijuelos, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and the upcoming Empress of the Splendid Season. The 1998 Discover Great New Writers Award will be presented in March in a special ceremony in New York City and carries a prize of $10,000.

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