Ellyn Bache, author of more than a dozen books

Join Joy Radio on Nov. 14, at 11 am, ET as we interview Ellyn Bache. She is the author of more than a dozen books, including the novel, Safe Passage, which was made into a film starring Susan Sarandon and Sam Shepard, and a short story collection, The Value of Kindness, that won the Willa Cather Fiction Prize. A native of Washington, DC, she began her writing career doing freelance newspaper articles for the DC newspapers when her children were small. But her real love was always fiction. Her first short stories appeared in commercial magazines like Seventeen and Good Housekeeping, and later she published widely in literary journals ranging from Ascent to Shenandoah to The Carolina Quarterly.  But she didn’t write a novel until all four of her children were in school full time. Since then, she’s written nine critically-acclaimed novels for adults, as well as several books for children and teens.Her novels have been, among other things, Literary Guild selections, Reviewers Choice nominees, “Recommended Holiday Reading” selections from Publishers Weekly, and winners of the Madcap prize for romantic comedy.Ellyn’s most recent novel is The Art of Saying Goodbye, a story about how four neighbors are forced to learn and grow and re-think their lives during the difficult days after one of their neighbors is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  The novel was chosen as a SIBA (Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance) summer 2011 “Okra Pick”—a program that singles out bookseller favorites from the hundreds of titles published each season. It was later nominated for the SIBA Book Award, and has been widely adopted by book discussion groups because of its universal themes. www.ellynbache.com.