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.

Review :
"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 A middle-aged songwriter reconsiders her life in Burgess' tender, sharply observed novel.Marley Stone, who has been writing hit songs for her twin sister, Andi, a country music star, for more than 20 years, is beginning to wonder whether she can do it any longer. After breaking up with her boyfriend of six years, she heads north from Seattle to the cabin in the woods where she and Andi lived with their flighty, determined mother, Donna, and where Donna has recently, and mysteriously, killed herself by stepping into the nearby lake with rocks sewn into her pockets. Intending to clear out both the cabin and her mind, Marley finds her life complicated by her old high school boyfriend, recently and possibly only temporarily separated from his wife, and by an abusive man from her past, who has begun stalking her. At the same time, she tries to solve the mystery of a letter her uncle claims Donna received from the father Marley and Andi never knew. Burgess crams more action and characters into a weekend than it can comfortably handle--particularly by the time Andi and the majority of her high school class shows up at a bar--and the male characters tend to be one-dimensionally good or evil, but the relationship between the twins is believably complex. Even Donna, who could easily have become the stereotypically unhinged mom, is intriguingly complicated, unknowable to the end. Burgess evokes both Seattle and the Idaho countryside in sensuous detail, and effortlessly weaves the process of music-making into the story.A touching exploration of two sisters pulled by the past. -- Kirkus Review