"The fourth novel in the Burgdorf Cycle"
"Children and Fire "tells the story of one day that will forever transform the lives of the people in Burgdorf, Germany, the fictitious village by the river in Ursula Hegi's bestselling novels. February 27, 1934--the first anniversary of the burning of Reichstag, the Parliament building in Berlin.
Thekla Jansen, a gifted young teacher, loves her students and tries to protect them from the chaos beyond their village. Believing the Nazis' new regime will not last forever, Thekla begins to relinquish some of her freedoms to keep her teaching position. She has always taken her moral courage for granted, but when each compromise chips away at that courage, she knows she must reclaim it.
Ursula Hegi funnels pivotal moments in history through the experience of Thekla, her students, and the townspeople as she writes along the edge where sorrow and bliss meet, and shows us how one society--educated, cultural, compassionate--can slip into a reality that's fabricated by propaganda and controlled by fear.
Gorgeously rendered and emotionally taut, "Children and Fire "confirms Ursula Hegi's position as one of the most distinguished writers of her generation.

Stones from the River is a daring, dramatic and complex novel of life in Germany. It is set in Burgdorf, a small fictional German town, between 1915 and 1951. The protagonist is Trudi Montag, a Zwerg -- the German word for dwarf woman. As a dwarf she is set apart, the outsider whose physical "otherness" has a corollary in her refusal to be a part of Burgdorf's silent complicity during and after World War II. Trudi establishes her status and power, not through beauty, marriage, or motherhood, but rather as the town's librarian and relentless collector of stories.

Through Trudi's unblinking eyes, we witness the growing impact of Nazism on the ordinary townsfolk of Burgdorf as they are thrust on to a larger moral stage and forced to make choices that will forever mark their lives. Stones from the River is a story of secrets, parceled out masterfully by Trudi -- and by Ursula Hegi -- as they reveal the truth about living through unspeakable times.

A joy to read. --New York Times Book Review From beloved bestselling author Ursula Hegi, a new novel about three mothers, set on the shores of the Nordsee, perfect for fans of Water for Elephants and The Light Between Oceans. In the summer of 1878, the Ludwig Zirkus arrives on Nordstrand in Germany, to the delight of the island's people. But after the show, a Hundred-Year Wave roars from the Nordsee and claims three young children. Three mothers are on the beach when it happens: Lotte, whose children are lost; Sabine, a Zirkus seamstress with her grown daughter; and Tilli, just a girl herself, who will give birth later that day at St. Margaret's Home for Pregnant Girls. After the tragedy, Lotte's husband escapes with the Zirkus, while she loses the will to care for their surviving son. Tilli steps in, bonding with him in a way she isn't allowed to with her own baby, taken away at birth. Sabine, struggling to keep her childlike daughter safe in the world, forms a complicated friendship with Lotte. But the mothers' fragile trio is threatened when Lotte and her husband hatch a dangerous plan to reunite their family, and Tilli and Sabine must try to find a way to pull them back to reality. As full of joy and beauty as it is of pain, and told with the luminous power that has made Ursula Hegi a beloved bestselling author for decades, The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls is a shining testament to the ways in which women hold each other up in the most unexpected of circumstances.

Friends since earliest childhood, Annie, Jake, and Mason have a special bond. When Annie's parents die on the same night that she and Mason get married, the three friends decide to raise Annie's infant sister, Opal, together. But their bonds of intimacy, already entangled, become dangerously close, on the line. One fateful night, the three friends goad one another into crossing that line with shocking consequences.

The bestselling author of "Stones from the River" delivers her most ambitious and dramatic novel yet -- the unforgettable story of an endearing, but also flawed, Italian American family.
In December 1953 Anthony Amedeo's world is nested in his Bronx neighborhood, his parents' Studebaker, the Paradise Theater, Yankee Stadium -- and in his imagination, where he longs for a stencil kit to decorate the windows like all the other kids on his street. Instead he gets a very different present: his uncle Malcolm's family.
Malcolm is in jail for stealing -- once again -- from his latest new job, and Anthony's aunt and twin cousins settle into the Amedeos' fifth-floor walk-up. Sharing a room with girls is excruciating for Anthony, despite his affinity for the twins. But the real change in Anthony's life comes one evening when he causes the unthinkable to happen, changing each family member's life forever.
Evoking all the plenty and optimism of postwar America, "Sacred Time" spans three generations, taking us from the Bronx of the 1950s to contemporary Brooklyn. Keenly observing the dark side of family -- and its gracefulness -- Hegi has outdone herself with this captivating novel about childhood's tenderness and the landscape of loneliness. Ultimately she reveals how the transforming power of a singular event can reverberate through a family for generations. With gravity and poise, Hegi turns her astute yet forgiving eye on the essential frailty and dignity of the human condition in this elegant and fast-paced novel.

The bestselling author of Stones from the River and The Vision of Emma Blau renews her reputation as an extraordinary writer of short stories in this major collection that balances her reader on the magical border of laughter and sorrow.

In Hotel of the Saints, Hegi enters the perspectives of lovers and loners, eccentrics and artists, children and parents: a musician tries to protect her daughter from loving a blind man; a seminary student yearns for the certainty of faith that belonged to him as a boy; a woman transcends her embarrassment for her first love, who has tripled in size.

Ursula Hegi's bicultural background enriches these eleven luminous stories that are set in Europe, Mexico, and the United States. Her characters take risks in searching out the unique places where faith thrives for each of them -- a rundown hotel, the currents of Cabo San Lucas, the embrace of an ex-convict. And once again, she surrounds them with her elegant language and exquisite images.

Brilliantly interviewed by bestselling novelist Ursula Hegi, German Americans born in Germany during and immediately following World War II speak out about the legacy of grief and shame that continues to haunt them.

Like Studs Terkel in his classic Working, Hegi uses the art of the interview to delve into the personal histories of these women and men as they confront -- some for the first time -- the terrible and pervasive silence that made any mention of the Holocaust taboo in their homes and schools while they were growing up. They share their pain, anger, and compassion as they take us into the world of their parents and try to sort out the impact of the war on their own lives.

Echoing many of the themes Hegi explored in Stones from the River, this powerful and provocative oral history is the first book to capture the long-silent voices of post-war German Americans stifled by the legacy of their homeland.

"Compelling for anyone interested in stories that transcend countries and races". -- Sabine Reichel, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Provides an important perspective and an understanding of post-Holocaust Germany, Hitler's legacy of shame and grief and the immigration experience". -- The Associated Press

In this stunning collection of stories, bestselling author Ursula Hegi focuses on the problems of love -- familial, parental, conjugal, and emergent. With compassion and her "unfailing immediacy of language," she raises the struggles of her characters to a plane of recognition that enables them to transcend despair. Life and death, age and youth, attained hopes and unearned pleasures, provide the human settings for a brilliant exploration of life at its most pointed and significant.

Floating in My Mother's Palm is the compelling and mystical story of Hanna Malter, a young girl growing up in 1950's Burgdorf, the small German town Ursula Hegi so brilliantly brought to life in her bestselling novel Stones from the River. Hanna's courageous voice evokes her unconventional mother, who swims during thunderstorms; the illegitimate son of an American GI, who learns from Hanna about his father; and the librarian, Trudi Montag, who lets Hanna see her hometown from a dwarf's extraordinary point of view. Although Ursula Hegi wrote Floating in My Mother's Palm first, it can be read as a sequel to Stones from the River.

Brilliantly stretching literary conventions, Ursula Hegi, author of the best-selling Stones from the River, creates a funny and original novel within a novel to explore the doubts, decisions, and "might-have-beens" that mark not only the writing process but life itself. As her "author" and her fictional heroine deal with their intrusions into each other's lives, Hegi reveals much about the choices women make, the ambiguities they face, and the often surprising ways reality and fiction merge.

The Bronx, 1953. Leonora and Floria are sisters-in-law and friends, dancing with each other, laughing with each other, arguing with each other. But when Floria's daughter dies in a terrible accident involving Leonora's son, Anthony, family ties are put to the ultimate test. Floria struggles to find a way through her grief, gaining solace in isolation; Leonora faces the world afresh, a single woman, mother to a son whose burden of guilt weights heavy. With warmth, humour and consummate storytelling, Hegi follows the family through the last half of the twentieth century as they try to find meaning in tragedy, finding, instead, their own paths to redemption.

An injury at birth left Audrey with a wandering eye. Though flawed, the bad eye functions well enough to permit her an idiosyncratic view of the world, one she welcomes in the stifling postwar Brooklyn of the 1950s. During a journey to Manhattan to see a doctor about her sight, she begins to explore the sexual rites of adulthood. But can her romance last? In this beautifully observed novel, Lynne Sharon Schwartz raises themes of innocence and escape while illuminating the rich inner life of a singular girl.