Helene Simonauer and Evelyn Turner are two formidable women whose paths cross when their children marry. Both women are sharp, cunning, and unwavering in their conflicting beliefs about marriage, responsibility, and family and, most pressingly, their efforts to vie for the love of their shared granddaughter.

At Last paints a vivid portrait of the American Midwest, capturing the essence of a time and place where societal norms and personal aspirations often clashed. Marisa Silver’s narrative weaves together the lives of Helene and Evelyn, from their vastly different childhoods through the pivotal events that define them. Both intimate and expansive, and capturing the complexities of ambition and love with humor and insight, At Last is a testament to what happens when an unintended, even unwanted relationship turns out to be a central one that defines a life.

The year is 1978. Ares Ramirez, age 12, lives with his mother, Laurel, and his younger brother Malcolm in a trailer at the edge of the Salton Sea, an unintentionally man-made body of water in the middle of the Southern California desert. It is a desolate, forgotten place, whose inhabitants thrive amidst seemingly impossible circumstances.
Where birds fly by day across the desert sky, by night government fighter planes and helicopters make training runs using live ammunition, and an anonymous dead body floats in from the sea. These events inspire Ares, on the cusp of his adolescence, to enact elaborate fantasies of mortal combat. His membership in a troubled family marks Ares as a casualty of a different kind of war. Malcolm, age 7, is mentally handicapped, and his mother chooses not to do anything about it.
Ares' struggle with the burden of responsibility -- to himself and to others -- draws him into a world of drugs, violence, and sex that he is not prepared for, launching him into a very personal battle for his own identity, one that has a lethal outcome.

"Blindness will be like this." So says ten-year-old Will Burton, trying to reimagine his life in the wake of his father's abrupt disappearance, as his family picks up stakes and moves to California. Another boy, Rogelio Augilar, risks his life to cross the border illegally from Mexico to reach his father, enduring gangs, police roundups, and the pitiless desert. And Marlene McClure, a hard-edged, feisty teenager, leaves her own Midwestern home in search of a father she has imagined but never known. The lives of each of these families converge on a single home in Los Angeles where the very needs and desires that have torn them apart allow them a measure of hope together. Written with heart-stopping grace and a powerful understanding of the needs and desires that define family, "No Direction Home" masterfully evokes how far we will go in the name of a place to call home. Reading group guide included."

A New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001, the critical success of Babe in Paradise heralds Marisa Silver as one of America's most talented young writers.

The unforgettable characters of Babe in Paradise—an aging stunt man, a chauffeur, and a voice-over actor among them—live on the periphery of Los Angeles's allure, outside its glamour and success. Marisa Silver's singular voice makes us care deeply about their everyday desperations and hard-won hopes.

"Magnificent....[Silver's] writing stings, but the pain is good."—Village Voice

Marisa Silver dazzled and inspired readers with her critically acclaimed "The God of War "(a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist), praised by Richard Russo as "a novel of great metaphorical depth and beauty." In this elegant, finely wrought new collection, "Alone With You, "Silver has created eight indelible stories that mine the complexities of modern relationships and the unexpected ways love manifests itself. Her brilliantly etched characters confront life's abrupt and unsettling changes with fear, courage, humor, and overwhelming grace.
In the O. Henry Prize-winning story "The Visitor," a VA hospital nurse's aide contends with a family ghost and discovers the ways in which her own past haunts her. The reticent father in "Pond" is confronted with a Solomonic choice that pits his love for his daughter against his feelings for her young son. In "Night Train to Frankfurt," first published in "The New Yorker, "a daughter travels to an alternative-medicine clinic in Germany in a gambit to save her mother's life. And in the title story, a woman vacations in Morocco with her family while contemplating a decision that will both ruin and liberate them all.
From "Temporary," where a young woman confronts the ephemeral nature of companionship, to "Three Girls," in which sisters trapped in a snowstorm recognize the boundaries of childhood, the nuanced voices of "Alone With You "bear the hallmarks of an instant classic from a writer with unerring talent and imaginative resource. Silver has the extraordinary ability to render her fictional inhabitants instantly relatable, in all their imperfections. Her stories have the singular quality of looking in a mirror. We see at once what is familiar and what is strange. In these stirring narratives, we meet ourselves anew.

Bestselling author Marisa Silver takes Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother "photograph as inspiration for a story of two women--one famous and one forgotten--and their remarkable chance encounter.
In 1936, a young mother resting by the side of the road in central California is spontaneously photographed by a woman documenting migrant laborers in search of work. Few personal details are exchanged and neither woman has any way of knowing that they have produced one of the most iconic images of the Great Depression. In present day, Walker Dodge, a professor of cultural history, stumbles upon a family secret embedded in the now-famous picture. In luminous prose, Silver creates an extraordinary tale from a brief event in history and its repercussions throughout the decades that follow--a reminder that a great photograph captures the essence of a moment yet only scratches the surface of a life.