Eleanor Brown

A rare, funny and poignant novel celebrating the beauty of OPEN ADOPTION and NON-TRADITIONAL FAMILIES.They look just like any other family... but between the four children there are THREE sets of parents who committed to an open adoption of biological siblings, keeping the children connected after the death of their grandmother.Tabitha the planner of the group, is insistent that everything happens just so. Quiet single mother Ginger resists the forced togetherness, and newest mother Elizabeth is still reeling from going directly from failed fertility treatments into adopting a newborn.But when the three women receive a surprising call from their children’s birth mother, announcing she is pregnant again and wants them to help her find an adoptive family for this child too, the delicate bonds they are still struggling to form threaten to collapse. As tensions start to rise on their joint family holiday, the three women reckon with their own feelings about what it means to be a mother and what they owe each other as a family.The New York Times bestselling author of The Weird Sisters returns with a striking and intimate new novel about three very different women facing an impossible question: what makes a family?Real Simple's Best Books of 2022The Washington Post's 12 Noteworthy Books for July and AugustEntertainment Weekly’s Best New Books of July 2022'[A] full-bodied exploration of family ties, especially those made by choice' The New York Times Book Review'Brown’s experience with adoption brings emotional depth to her chronicle of each woman’s anxieties' The Washington Post'Brown has a sure hand in portraying the adoptive women; their smart, lively dialogue sparks as the characters try to define the boundaries of a family' Publishers' Weekly'A prismatic story of family, adoption, and how the people we choose to keep close shape who we are' Kirkus'Explores what it means to be a family, in all its messy complication' Christina Baker Kline'Brown brings compassion and insight to exploring the hopes and vulnerability that make us first human, then family' Isabel Costello'A beautifully written, elegantly assembled exploration of the joys and complications of family, any family, no matter what it looks like' Laurie Frankel'I adored this story' Prima'Smart, original, wholly satisfying' Elinor Lipman

Eleanor Brown’s first collection, Maiden Speech, published by Bloodaxe in 1996, included her much anthologised “girlfriend’s revenge” poem ‘Bitcherel’ along with a widely praised sequence of fifty love and end-of-love sonnets written during her 20s. Her second collection, White Ink Stains, appearing three decades later, draws on the lives of women of all ages. Taking her title from the idea that when a woman writes about her experience as a woman, ‘she writes in white ink’ (Hélène Cixous), Eleanor Brown wanted to inscribe, among other things, the unseen labour of endowing infants with their mother tongue, their birthright of speech and language skills – the babbling, cooing, phonic repetition, echolalia, chanting of nonsense-words, singing of lullabies, nursery rhymes, counting rhymes, clapping songs, and telling of bedtime stories that is often the invisible and unrecorded work of women with pre-school-age children. A number of these poems were written in response to interviews made for the Reading Sheffield oral history project. Eleanor Brown spent over a year listening to recordings before starting to write these poems, some of which stay very faithful to the speaker’s own words, while others travel further into an imaginative or active, poetic listening; these are the poems she heard not in what was said, but in pauses, intonations, emphasis, whispers, asides, digressions and deflections.

From the bestselling author of THE WEIRD SISTERS comes an enchanting tale of self-discovery that will strike a chord with anyone who has ever felt they've lost their way. 'I adored The Light of Paris. It's so lovely and big-hearted' JOJO MOYES 'Soulfulness and emotional insight meet laugh-out-loud humour' PAULA McLAIN, author of The Paris Wife

'I CAPTURE THE CASTLE meets THE VIRGIN SUICIDES. An eccentric and totally irresistible read'Glamour

The beloved New York Times bestseller from acclaimed author Eleanor Brown about three sisters who love each other, but just don't happen to like each other very much. Three sisters have returned to their childhood home, reuniting the eccentric Andreas family. Here, books are a passion (there is no problem a library card can't solve) and TV is something other people watch. Their father--a professor of Shakespeare who speaks almost exclusively in verse--named them after the Bard's heroines. It's a lot to live up to. The sisters each have a hard time communicating with their parents and their lovers, but especially with one another. What can the shy homebody eldest sister, the fast-living middle child, and the bohemian youngest sibling have in common? Only that none has found life to be what was expected; and now, faced with their parents' frailty and their own personal disappointments, not even a book can solve what ails them...

This book is based on the largest and most extensive empirical study of contemporary leadership in primary and secondary schools in England. The results demonstrate that heads of successful schools improve the quality of student learning and achievement through who they are – their values, virtues, dispositions and competencies – as well as their timely use of change and improvement strategies.Successful School Leadership provides a comprehensive analysis of the values and qualities of head teachers. It assesses the strategies they use and how they adapt these to their particular school context in order to ensure positive increases in the learning, well being and achievement of their students. The authors:Identify a basic set of leadership practices resulting from their findings Analyse and describe the leadership values, qualities and behaviours related to different phases in schools’ improvement journeysProvide illustrative case studies of primary and secondary schools that highlight context sensitive strategies Provide a contemporary overview of international research and thinking about successful school leadershipRecognize similar and distinguishing features between schools in different socio-economic groupsThis book is valuable reading for…school leaders and senior teachers, educational policy makers and advisors, as well as anyone involved or interested in education and its leadership.

Maiden Speech was the debut collection by Eleanor Brown, a witty poet who writes powerfully of love, and hilariously of love's pitfalls, most notably in her much anthologised "girlfriend's revenge" poem, 'Bitcherel'. Shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.