An intimate and lyrical celebration of great love, great art, and the sacrifices we make for both

For fifty years, Abe and Jane have been coming to Central Park, as starry-eyed young lovers, as frustrated and exhausted parents, as artists watching their careers take flight. They came alone when they needed to get away from each other, and together when they had something important to discuss. The Park has been their witness for half a century of love. Until now.

Jane is dying, and Abe is recounting their life together as a way of keeping them going: the parts they knew—their courtship and early marriage, their blossoming creative lives—and the parts they didn’t always want to know—the determined young student of Abe’s looking for a love story of her own, and their son, Max, who believes his mother chose art over parenthood, and who has avoided love and intimacy at all costs. Told in various points of view, even in conversation with Central Park, these voices weave in and out to paint a portrait as complicated and essential as love itself.

An homage to New York City, to romance, and even to loss, This Is a Love Story tenderly and suspensefully captures deep truths about life and marriage in radiant prose. It is about love that endures despite what life throws at us, or perhaps even because of it.

"Sassy, brash, acrobatic and colorful . . . I want to read it again and again." --"Time"
"Impressive . . . Soffer's style is natural and assured." --Meg Wolitzer, "All Things Considered," NPR

Lorca spends her life poring over cookbooks to earn the love of her distracted mother, a chef, who is now packing her off to boarding school. Desperate to prove herself, Lorca resolves to track down the recipe for her mother's ideal meal. She signs up for cooking lessons from Victoria, an Iraqi-Jewish immigrant profoundly shaken by her husband's death. Soon these two women develop a deeper bond while their concoctions--cardamom pistachio cookies, baklava, and "masgouf"--bake in Victoria's kitchen. But their individual endeavors force a reckoning with the past, the future, and the truth--whatever it might be.
In "Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots" we see how food sustains not just our bodies, but our hopes as well. "Bukra fil mish mish," the Arabic saying goes. Tomorrow, apricots may bloom.

"A profound and necessary new voice. Soffer's prose is as controlled as it is fresh, as incisive as it is musical. Soffer has arrived early, with an orchestra of talent at her disposal." --Colum McCann, author of "Let the Great World Spin "
"Moving and] extraordinary." --"Atlantic"
"A work of beauty in words . . . Soffer is a master artist painting the hidden hues of the human soul." --"New York Journal of Books"