Gabra Zackman

• Biography

  Gabra Zackman is an actress, author, and narrator who has won several AudioFile Earphones Awards. She was educated at Northwestern University. A classically trained actress, she has appeared in theaters all over the country as well as on film and television.

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• Praise for Books

  “This magnificent novel opens every little nerve of language and sends jolts of electricity along the spine. It’s a love story, and a family tale, and a song of history. It’s about shame and loss and recovery and beauty. It’s a novel to cherish, composed with great humanity and humor.” —Colum McCann

  “The Ocean in Winter is my absolute favorite kind of novel: wise, beautiful, moving, sad, rich. This magical tapestry woven from the lives of three sisters trying to reconnect to each other and themselves in the wake of their mother’s death does what the best fiction should: it makes you feel less alone on the trying, miraculous journey of being alive. I cried for the last forty pages—from joy and gratitude.” —Jenna Blum, New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Save Us and The Lost Family

  “This is a novel I wish I could have written. Keen, unsparing, and compassionate, Properties of Thirst reveals a world and a history I thought I knew, in language so beautiful, it took my breath away. Vividly alive, these characters mirror our present moment, our complex ties to this land and to each other, our most profound alienations and our fiercest loves.” —Ruth Ozeki, author of A Tale for the Time Being

  “Tenderness, steel, and rage forge the relationships of three sisters in the aftermath of their mother’s suicide. The Ocean in Winter shines a light on the layers of grief which build up and reverberate for generations after a family tragedy. Author Elizabeth de Veer lays bare—with razor-sharp precision and lush writing—how in the face of family crucibles, we can collapse or become strong at the broken places.” —Randy Susan Meyers, author of The Widow of Wall Street

  “Wiggins is a writer of substantial gifts.” —New York Times Book Review

  “Three sisters, two resilient, one fragile, face their memories and pain in Elizabeth de Veer’s The Ocean in Winter, which combines exquisitely observed atmosphere with a page-turning plot.” —Kathleen Gilles Seidel, author of Don’t Forget to Smile

  “Wiggins’s power is disjunctive, disruptive; she pounds the atoms of discourse until they split and go radioactive.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review 

  “The Ocean in Winter is a deft and beautiful book, brilliantly crafted, thrilling, funny, and heartbreaking by turns. It’s about difficult sisters, shapeless yearnings, solitude, loss, the shadow of the past; about not knowing how to stop pretending, about losing control, about finding one another or … not. Its characters are vivid and real, their voices unmistakable. They stay with you.” —Benjamin Rosenbaum, author of The Unraveling

  “Marianne Wiggins does not so much tell a story as make her reader live it…She renews our sense of what prose fiction can do.” —Sunday Times (London)

  “With sharp, tender insight, Elizabeth de Veer’s gorgeous novel lays bare the inner worlds of three sisters trying to cope with devastating, incomprehensible loss. I came to love these brave, flawed, easily recognizable characters as they reached for answers, and for each other, across some divides that could be breached and some that couldn’t. Fiercely intelligent and always engaging, de Veer does what the best novelists do: she takes the full measure of her difficult subject, and transforms it through some alchemy into hard-won wisdom and grace.” —Elisabeth Elo, author of Finding Katarina M. and North of Boston

  “Marianne Wiggins dares to make fictions that stand in the face of heart-cracking circumstance, fictions that, in fact, resound with hearts shattering.” —Washington Post Book World 

  “Do we choose our memories, or do our memories choose us? That’s the central question for the three sisters in Elizabeth de Veer’s emotionally rich, incandescent debut novel. Ocean in Winter is a page-turner of a book with a family mystery at its core, and profoundly explores the ways in which women struggle to rebuild their lives after grief and trauma. You won’t want to put it down once you start.” —Holly Robinson, author of Beach Plum Island and Chance Harbor

  “[A] grand novel of principled and creative individuals caught in the vise of history…Loss, desire, moral dilemmas, reflection, and zesty dialogue with the do-good energy of Frank Capra films generate a WWII home front tale of profound and far-ranging inquiry and imagination, scintillating humor, intrepid romance, and conscience.” —Booklist (starred review)

  “This tale of love, loss, grief, and connections is one that could shatter your heartstrings. It is a saga of family turmoil that hints of the supernatural—a world of spirits that try to alert of danger, the past, and the way forward.” —Mystery & Suspense

  “Properties of Thirst is a graceful and arresting meditation on the dark nature of greed and desire in the face of dwindling natural resources and pernicious xenophobia. It is impossible to read this novel and ignore the fact that the unscrupulous choices we’ve made in the past are the ones we’re still making, ones that, if we’re not able to look at ourselves with the moral clarity Wiggins brings to her fiction, we will continue to make." —Marisa Silver, author of The Mysteries and Mary Coin

  “A compelling portrait of a wounded family seeking a path forward. Elizabeth de Veer writes with nuanced understanding of the complexities of hurt and healing, and she knows how to tell a damn good story. Rich in dialogue, action, and a keen sense of place, The Ocean in Winter pulls the reader into the swirling vortex of three lives shaped by a family legacy that will not let them go.” —Rilla Askew, author of Kind of Kin

  “Wise, beautiful, moving, sad, rich…It makes you feel less alone on the trying, miraculous journey of being alive.” —Jenna Blum, New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Save Us and The Lost Family

  “The Ocean in Winter is a compelling, well-written debut with the title being more than significant for this riveting novel as it illustrates the emotions of grief, pain, and even happiness which are often synonymous with the cold, destructive, and mysterious sea.” —New York Journal of Books

  “Three sisters confront their past as a raging storm batters coastal Massachusetts in de Veer’s tense debut…De Veer imbues this family drama with the mysteriousness of a ghost story and the pacing of a thriller…This rousing family drama effectively captures the emotional turbulence of overcoming trauma.” —Publishers Weekly

  “De Veer has created here not a story of joy versus sadness, but rather a study of how sisters navigate the world after experiencing a loss that reverberates in each’s life.” —Washington Independent Review of Books

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  • Properties of Thirst

  • By Marianne Wiggins

    Read by Stephen Graybill and Gabra Zackman

  • Release Date: 8/02/22

  • Formats: Large Print Hardcover

  Fifteen years after the publication of Evidence of Things Unseen, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Marianne Wiggins returns with a novel destined to be an American classic: a sweeping masterwork set during World War II about the meaning of family and the limitations of the American Dream.

  Rockwell “Rocky” Rhodes has spent years fiercely protecting his California ranch from the LA Water Corporation. It is here where he and his beloved wife, Lou, raised their twins, Sunny and Stryker, and it is here where Rocky has mourned Lou in the years since her death.

  As Sunny and Stryker reach the cusp of adulthood, the country teeters on the brink of war. Stryker decides to join the fight, deploying to Pearl Harbor not long before the bombs strike. Soon, Rocky and his family find themselves facing yet another incomprehensible tragedy.

  Rocky is determined to protect his remaining family and the land where they’ve loved and lost so much. But when the government decides to build a Japanese-American internment camp next to the ranch, Rocky realizes that the land faces even bigger threats than the LA watermen he’s battled for years. Complicating matters is the fact that the idealistic Department of the Interior man assigned to build the camp, who only begins to understand the horror of his task after it may be too late, becomes infatuated with Sunny and entangled with the Rhodes family.

  Properties of Thirst is a novel that is both universal and intimate. It is the story of a changing American landscape and an examination of one of the darkest periods in this country’s past, told through the stories of the individual loves and losses that weave together to form the fabric of our shared history. Ultimately, it is an unflinching distillation of our nation’s essence—and a celebration of the bonds of love and family that persist against all odds.

  • Properties of Thirst

  • By Marianne Wiggins

    Read by Stephen Graybill and Gabra Zackman

  • Release Date: 8/02/22

  • Formats: Large Print Hardcover

  Learn More
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  • The Ocean in Winter

  • By Elizabeth de Veer

    Read by Emily Lawrence, Rebecca Gibel, and Gabra Zackman

  • Release Date: 7/06/21

  • Formats: Large Print Hardcover, Hardcover, Trade Paperback

  An unforgettable story about grief, love, and what it means to be haunted, The Ocean in Winter marks the debut of a remarkable new voice in fiction.

  The lives of the three Emery sisters were changed forever when Alex found their mother drowned in the bathtub of their home. After their mother’s suicide, the girls’ father shut down emotionally, leaving Alex responsible for caring for Colleen and little Riley. Now the girls are grown and navigating different directions. Decades may have passed, but the unresolved trauma of their mother’s death still looms over them, creating distance between the sisters.

  Then, on a March night, a storm rages near the coast of northeastern Massachusetts. Alex sits alone in an old farmhouse she inherited. The lights are out because of the storm; then, an unexpected knock at the door. When Alex opens it, her beautiful younger sister stands before her. Riley has long been estranged from their family, prompting Colleen to hire the private investigator from whom they’d been awaiting news.

  After her mysterious visitation, Alex and Colleen are determined to reconcile with Riley and to face their painful past.

  • The Ocean in Winter

  • By Elizabeth de Veer

    Read by Emily Lawrence, Rebecca Gibel, and Gabra Zackman

  • Release Date: 7/06/21

  • Formats: Large Print Hardcover, Hardcover, Trade Paperback

  Learn More

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