Lisa Borders grew up in Central and Southern New Jersey. She is the author of the novel Cloud Cuckoo Land, winner of the Fred Bonnie Award for Best First Novel and fiction honors in the 2003 Massachusetts Book Awards. Lisa lives in Somerville, Massachusetts and teaches at Grub Street, Boston's independent writing center. She also works as a cytotechnologist.
"A fresh new voice in fiction." -Pat Conroy
"Deeply affecting and compulsively readable, The Fifty-First State
displays Lisa Borders' emotional acuity, first-rate skills as a
storyteller, and profound empathy not only for her two compelling
main characters but for an oft-neglected region and a disappearing
way of life."-Christopher Castellani, author of All This Talk of
Love
"The Fifty-First State is an embrace of a novel-warm, intimate,
enveloping-and, like all the best embraces, it starts with a thrill
and ends before you are entirely ready to let go. I read it in one
sitting and would have found a way to do the same even if it were
twice as long."-Yael Goldstein Love, author of The Passion of Tasha
Darsky
"Lisa Borders is a writer of fine emotional intelligence and
boundless compassion for her characters. In The Fifty-First State,
a story of finding family after devastating loss, estranged
siblings Hallie and Josh face problems so credible and realized
that I worried for them as if they were friends of mine, and they
surprised me in the way friends do."-Sheri Joseph, author of Where
You Can Find Me, Stray, and Bear Me Safely Over
"The Fifty-First State is a riveting, intricately detailed,
passionate novel, with a powerhouse pair of characters that will
fascinate and perplex you from the opening page until the final
gorgeous paragraph. Lisa Borders is a writer who not only
understands how to break your heart, but also how to piece it
together again."-Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin and We
Disappear
"A novel that begins with a bang and settles achingly into the
remnants of grief for those left behind-two near strangers who must
learn how to knit a new kind of family together, all within a
poisoned landscape in which even the smallest of creatures carry
the mark of the past in their deformed limbs. The metaphor is
pitch-perfect, the novel honest and plain-spoken, large in its
ambitions, with a voice that bends itself without a hitch to the
weight of its character's sorrows and resilience. With The
Fifty-First State, Lisa Borders has done it again."-Michelle
Hoover, author of The Quickening
"A big-hearted novel about the surprises-big and small, tragic and
gloriously sweet-that turn the tables on seemingly quotidian lives.
The Fifty-First State is a place where good news and fluke
disasters live side by side, whether in the lurking menace of a
sorry neighbor or the shifting nuances of developing love. That is
to say, a delightfully realistic world readers will
enthusiastically recognize as their own."-Daphne Kalotay, author of
Sight Reading"The Fifty-First State is a place of tenderness and
terror, with beautiful vistas of generosity of heart. I read this
novel in one sitting, moved by its deeply imagined coming-of-age
story, grateful for a writer whose compassion is matched by her
talent."-Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of 36 Arguments for
the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
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