Shelby Hearon has been widely praised for the insight, wit, and subtlety with which her novels limn the complexities of marriage and family ("What Jane Austen is to courtship, Shelby Hearon is to marriage"—New York Newsday), and the ways in which place can profoundly affect us all. Now, with Ella in Bloom, Hearon gives us her sharpest, funniest, most telling novel yet.

It is the story of Ella, who has always lived in the shadow of her "perfect" older sister. A gutsy single parent eking out a living for herself and her intrepid teenage daughter Birdie, Ella invents a genteel life, writing to her mother in drought-baked Texas about her heirloom roses, her linen dresses, and other amenities of a respectable life in Old Metairie, Louisiana. Little does her mother know about the run-down, scruffy house Ella really lives in, or that she makes ends meet by watering rich people’s houseplants when they flee the coastal summer heat.

But when Ella’s beautiful sister Terrell, on the way to meet her lover, is suddenly killed in a chartered plane crash, old family patterns are shattered. And Ella, confronting the reality of her life (and of the man she had relegated to the past) comes, finally and fully, into bloom.

Wise, wicked, and moving, in Shelby Hearon’s hands this portrait of a woman—a woman we all know—is guaranteed to give extraordinary pleasure.

“Shelby Hearon has outdone herself in her wonderful new novel. She has written a sexy and moving love story, populated with children you admire and grown-ups who try to deserve them. It’s about love across the generations as well as between the sheets; and you root for these characters, you cheer them home. Ella’s story is Shelby in full bloom.”—Frederick Busch