SO LONG AS WE'RE TOGETHER
Two little girls, holding hands and singing in the back seat of a car. There for each other, unafraid. Life for the Stone girls is a life lived on the edge. Singing for a living, Marley and Andi find their way through a childhood of upheaval marked by their mother Donna's dark, unpredictable flights. Today, Marley writes the songs her twin, country diva Andi Stone, makes famous, and the girls' connection struggles to survive the cuts and devastations of fame. "You girls," laments their manager. "One of you marries indiscriminately, the other not at all." When without warning Donna Stone takes her own life, alone at the family cabin, danger stalks Marley back to Lost Prince Lake, back into the loves and betrayals of the past. Hidden truths threaten to take the Stone sisters down, singly and together. A powerful, intimate portrait of love, ambition, and survival, SO LONG AS WE'RE TOGETHER takes the reader into the lives of three women who give song to broken hearts, and for whom music is the language of family.
PRAISE for SO LONG AS WE'RE TOGETHER
"So Long As We're Together by Glenda Burgess is a deftly crafted and powerfully intimate story of love, ambition, and survival that takes the reader into the lives of three memorable women. An inherently fascinating and absorbing read from cover to cover, So Long As We're Together showcases author Glenda Burgess' genuine flair for a distinctively reader engaging narrative storytelling style."
—Midwest Book Review
"With stirring, pinpoint prose and a genius for the emotional terrain of family, grief and memory, Glenda Burgess has written a novel of great and lasting power with So Long As We're Together. The story of the musical Stone family will reverberate in your heart and mind long after you finish reading it."
—Shawn Vestal, author of Daredevils
"The distinctions between truth and the stories we tell ourselves, omissions and lies, and how the past can both break and heal us are explored beautifully in Burgess's So Long As We're Together. Tender and wise, this novel creates a melody that will resonate and sing till the very last page."
— Marjan Kamali, author of The Stationery Store
"Music scores the lives of two sisters together from girlhood to adulthood in Burgess's sublime novel So Long As We're Together. About ambition and the price of fame and the ties that bind (and sometimes strangle us), it's also a fierce, frank portrayal of the ways we love one another—how we succeed and sometimes, how we fail. Piercingly honest and gorgeously written, and as indelible as a song you love."
— Caroline Leavitt, New York Times Bestselling author of Is This Tomorrow
"In Burgess's hand, the women of the Stone family are rendered as bright, as fractured, and as real as any characters I have ever read—and all with clean, direct prose that evokes the work of Jess Walter, Anthony Doerr, and Rebecca Makkai. This is a propulsive, moving book."
— Christian Kiefer, author of Phantoms
"Glenda Burgess has written a deeply felt novel about families, particularly those made up of strong women. She beautifully explores both the sticky nature of sisterly love—the kind of love that persists even (or perhaps especially) when we're not even sure we like each other—and the mystery of maternal love, which is almost too big, even when imperfect, to comprehend. Her sentences ring with the music her characters make."
— Peternelle van Arsdale, author of The Cold is in Her Bones
"So Long As We're Together broke my heart and stitched it back together with endlessly sweet music. Tender, tough, and dazzling as an early snow. I loved this book."
— Laura Benedict, author of The Stranger Inside