Fran Hawthorne – Jill Grinberg Literary Management

Fran Hawthorne

Fran Hawthorne is an award-winning author and journalist who has covered health care, politics, finance, and business news for over twenty-five years. She was previously an editor and writer at Fortune, Business Week, and the Bergen Record, and has been a regular contributor to The New York Times and Newsday. She writes book reviews for The National and the New York Journal of Books. She is the author of eight books of nonfiction, including Ethical Chic: The Inside Story of the Companies We Think We Love; Pension Dumping: The Reasons, the Wreckage, the Stakes for Wall Street, and Inside the FDA: The Business and Politics Behind the Drugs We Take and the Food We Eat. Her debut novel, The Heirs, was published in 2018.

Agent

Sophia Seidner

The Heirs

After breaking her hip in a serious accident, Eleanor Ritter’s mother, Rose, a Holocaust survivor now living in New Jersey, suddenly starts talking about her harrowing childhood in Poland and the taboo subjects she has refused to discuss for half a century — even speaking in long-forgotten Polish. Around the same time, Eleanor learns that the parents of her nine-year-old son’s soccer teammate, Tadek, are Catholics from Poland.

As Eleanor becomes fixated with digging into the histories of both her mother and Tadek’s family, her obsession strains her already difficult relationship with Rose, as well as her marriage to Nick, an IT technician who is himself caught up in preparing for the feared Y2K turn of the millennium.

Eleanor starts flirting heavily with the soccer coach, ignoring her twelve-year-old daughter’s growing rebellion and her son’s misery when he becomes the team pariah for badly messing up several games. Meanwhile, the “sure-fire” tech stock that Eleanor bought behind Nick’s back is losing money. Even as her quest nourishes an odd friendship with Tadek’s mother, it forces Eleanor to face the unavoidable questions:

How many generations does guilt carry on? What did your grandparents do to my grandparents?

Praise for The Heirs

“In The Heirs, Fran Hawthorne skillfully weaves an intimate and compelling portrait of Eleanor Ritter, a woman whose growing obsession with her family’s experiences during the Holocaust threatens to derail her life more than 50 years later. Both heartbreaking and hopeful, The Heirs vividly lays bare the injustice of a legacy of guilt, and the danger of holding the present accountable for our past.” –V.R. Barkowski, author of A Twist of Hate

Publisher

Stephen F. Austin University Press

Publication Date

May 11, 2018

Age Category

Adult

Genre

Contemporary Fiction

Rights

Stephen F. Austin University Press