City of Girls - Elizabeth Gilbert Page 0,186

world without you. I hope I never have to!

Thank you to Martha Beck, Karen Gerdes, and Rowan Mangan, for reading thousands of pages of my writing over the past few years, and for wrapping me up in the great big wingspan of your collective love. Thank you to Glennon Doyle, for sitting by my door all those nights. I needed it, and I am grateful.

Thank you to my sister-wives, Gigi Madl and Stacey Weinberg, for their love and sacrifice during such a hard season of pain and loss. I could not have survived 2017 without you.

Thank you to Sheryl Moller, Jennie Willink, Jonny Miles, and Anita Schwartz, for being enthusiastic early readers of these pages. Thank you to Billy Buell, for lending me the use of his fabulous name.

Sarah Chalfant: As ever, you are the wind beneath my wings.

Miriam Feuerle: As ever, I love rolling with you.

Lastly, a message to Rayya Elias: I know how badly you wanted to be here at my side while I wrote this novel. All I can tell you, baby, is that you were. You are never not at my side. You are my heart. I will always love you.

Also available by Elizabeth Gilbert

Big Magic

Readers of all ages and walks of life have drawn inspiration from Elizabeth Gilbert’s books for years. Now, this beloved author shares her wisdom and unique understanding of creativity, shattering the perceptions of mystery and suffering that surround the process – and showing us all just how easy it can be.

By sharing stories from her own life, as well as those from her friends and the people that have inspired her, Elizabeth Gilbert challenges us to embrace our curiosity, tackle what we most love and face down what we most fear.

Whether you long to write a book, create art, cope with challenges at work, embark on a long-held dream, or simply to make your everyday life more vivid and rewarding, Big Magic will take you on a journey of exploration filled with wonder and unexpected joys.

‘Gilbert dares us into adventures of worldly discovery’ Barbara Kingsolver

‘If a more likable writer than Gilbert is currently in print, I haven’t found him or her … Gilbert’s prose is fueled by a mix of intelligence, wit and colloquial exuberance that is close to irresistible’ Jennifer Egan

‘Sumptuous ... Gilbert’s prose is by turns flinty, funny, and incandescent’ New Yorker

Click here to order

The Signature of All Things

Longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction

Longlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize

From the moment Alma Whittaker steps into the world, everything about life intrigues her. Instilled with an unquenchable sense of wonder by her father, a botanical explorer and the richest man in the New World, Alma is raised in a house of luxury and curiosity. It is not long before she becomes a gifted botanist in her own right. But as she flourishes and her research takes her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, the man she comes to love draws her in the opposite direction – into the realm of the spiritual, the divine and the magical.

The Signature of All Things soars across the globe of the nineteenth century, from London and Peru, to Philadelphia, Tahiti and beyond. Peopled with extraordinary characters along the way, most of all it has an unforgettable heroine in Alma Whittaker.

‘The story of Alma Whittaker’s journey of discovery has irresistible momentum’ Helen Dunmore, The Times

‘A straight-up storyteller who dares us into adventures of worldly discovery’ Barbara Kingsolver, New York Times Book Review

‘Charming and compelling ... A big novel in all senses – extensively researched, compellingly readable and with a powerful charm that will surely propel it towards the bestseller lists’ Jane Shilling, Daily Telegraph

Click here to order

At Home on the Range

Recently, Elizabeth Gilbert unpacked some boxes of family books that had been sitting in her mother’s attic for decades. Among the old, dusty hardbacks was a book called At Home on the Range, written by her great-grandmother, Margaret Yardley Potter – a workaday cookbook devoted to seeking out epicurean adventures that was far ahead of its time.

Stressing the importance of sourcing food locally and eating well, At Home on the Range is a humorous and eminently useable volume with original family recipes that reveals where Elizabeth Gilbert inherited her love of food and warm, infectious prose.

‘Ideal for those who like their recipes to come with a back story ... The book is tremendously funny, and her cooking was way ahead of her time’ Sally Hughes, BBC Good Food Magazine

‘Hilarious and has sections with blissful titles such as Weekend Guests without a Weakened Hostess’ English Home

Click here to order

Committed

At the end of her bestselling memoir Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe – a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship who'd been living in Indonesia when they met. Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity to each other, but also swore to never, ever, under any circumstances get legally married. (Both survivors of difficult divorces. Enough said.) But providence intervened one day in the form of the U.S. government, who – after unexpectedly detaining Felipe at an American border crossing – gave the couple a choice: they could either get married, or Felipe would never be allowed to enter the country again.

Having been effectively sentenced to wed, Gilbert tackled her fears of marriage by delving completely into this topic, trying with all her might to discover (through historical research, interviews and much personal reflection) what this stubbornly enduring old institution actually is. The result is Committed – a witty and intelligent contemplation of marriage that debunks myths, unthreads fears and suggests that sometimes even the most romantic of souls must trade in her amorous fantasies for the humbling responsibility of adulthood.

‘Like Eat Pray Love, her follow-up, Committed, feels irresistibly confessional ... I found myself guzzling Committed, reading it in mighty chunks, far into the night. Whenever I put it down, it was pinched by my mother or sister’ Sunday Times

‘An unblinkered consideration of what marriage really means’ Woman & Home

‘Insightful ... She speaks for many who question the bliss in conjugal bonds, or, at least, those who want to understand how the tradition still perpetuates. For better or worse’ Vogue

Click here to order

Eat Pray Love

It’s 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She’s in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they’re trying for a baby – and she doesn't want any of it. A divorce and a turbulent love affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered and realises it is time to pursue her own journey in search of three things she has been missing: pleasure, devotion and balance. So she travels to Rome, where she learns Italian from handsome, brown-eyed identical twins and gains twenty-five pounds, an ashram in India, where she finds that enlightenment entails getting up in the middle of the night to scrub the temple floor, and Bali where a toothless medicine man of indeterminate age offers her a new path to peace: simply sit still and smile. And slowly happiness begins to creep up on her.

‘A writer of incandescent talent’ Annie Proulx

‘If a more likable writer than Gilbert is currently in print, I haven’t found him or her ... Gilbert’s prose is fuelled by a mix of intelligence, wit and colloquial exuberance that is close to irresistible’ Jennifer Egan, New York Times

‘A witty, honest account of loss and new beginnings, this will be enjoyed by anyone who’s realised “having it all” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be’ Easy Living

Click here to order

Pilgrims

The cowboys, strippers, labourers and magicians of Pilgrims are all on their way to being somewhere, or someone, else. Some are browbeaten and world-weary, others are deluded and naïve, yet all seek companionship as fiercely as they can. A tough East Coast girl dares a western cowboy to run off with her; a matronly bar owner falls in love with her nephew; an innocent teenager falls hopelessly for the local bully’s sister.

These are tough heroes and heroines, hardened by their experiences, who struggle for their epiphanies. Yet hope is never far away and though they may act blindly, they always act bravely. Sharply drawn and tenderly observed, Pilgrims is filled with Gilbert’s inimitable humour and warmth.

‘Gilbert takes us on a grit-strewn ride into the heart of Country and Western territory: good old boys, cowgirls, dingy bars, the backwaters and empty plains of America’ Sunday Times

‘The distinctive cant of Gilbert’s stories recalls the off-kilter worlds of T. Craghessan Boyle, and she embraces the bizarre and fabulous with similar enthusiasm ... But blunt summaries capture none of Gilbert’s subtlety. Whether trashing those on high or celebrating those below, she moves stealthily, avoiding the temptation to grandstand, moralize or, especially, patronize’ New York Times Book Review

‘This first-time writer has all the hallmarks of a great writer: sympathy, wit, and an amazing ear for dialogue’ Harper’s Bazaar

Click here to order