A novel of dreams and affections, lamentations and betrayals, The Light of Evening delves deep into the intense relationship between a mother and daughter. As she does in much of her stunning fiction, O'Brien reveals a fierce and intimate knowledge of the forces that both bind families together and keep them at odds.

A Boston Globe Book of the Year

"If you loved The English Patient, there’s probably a place in your heart for The Welsh Girl...Evocative."—USA Today

"Beautifully written and authentic in its portrayal of the unexpected fallout a family death can engender." — People

Local radio personality Teresa Rae Wood is unstoppable — until, at age thirty-eight, she is diagnosed with cancer, and, in just a few weeks, she is gone. In this refreshingly unsentimental tale of the family Teresa leaves behind, Cheryl Strayed offers what O, The Oprah Magazine called "a deeply honest novel of life after catastrophe, of intimacy lost and found."

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," Tolstoy famously wrote in Anna Karenina. But is it really true that happiness is so predictable and bland? Literature professor Tracy Farber—
content with friends and work and satisfied to be single at age thirty-three—takes umbrage and sets out to prove that happiness can be uniquely interesting, in literature and in life.