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Heather Abel

Biography

Heather Abel

Heather Abel is the author of THE OPTIMISTIC DECADE and THE EMILYS. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, and the online Paris Review, among other places. She worked as a reporter and editor in California and Colorado before moving to New York where she received an MFA in fiction writing from the New School University. She lives in Northampton, MA and currently teaches creative writing at Smith College.

Heather Abel

Books by Heather Abel

The Emilys
by Heather Abel - Fiction

Eve is at a breaking point. Alone with her two children in Massachusetts while her husband pursues his music career in New York City, she’s frustrated, bored and, above all, lonely when she runs into Demeter, a childhood friend with whom she shared one transformative summer. Demeter’s daughter, like a growing number of others, cannot go outside during the day. No one knows why, and doctors are skeptical that these people --- soon dubbed Emilys, after the famously reclusive local poet --- are telling the truth. But Eve believes Demeter and will help him --- if she can just figure out how. When Eve unites with an unlikely band of fellow detectives, she feels a clear sense of purpose for the first time in years. But what is she willing to risk to find a cure?

The Optimistic Decade
by Heather Abel - Fiction

Framed by the oil shale bust and the real estate boom, by protests against Reagan and against the Gulf War, THE OPTIMISTIC DECADE takes us into the lives of five unforgettable characters and is a sweeping novel about idealism, love, class and a piece of land that changes everyone who lives on it. There is Caleb Silver, the beloved founder of the back-to-the-land camp Llamalo, who is determined to teach others to live simply. There are the ranchers, Don and his son, Donnie, who gave up their land to Caleb and now want it back. There is Rebecca Silver, determined to become an activist like her father and undone by the spell of both Llamalo and new love. And there is David, a teenager who has turned Llamalo into his personal religion.