I am thrilled to introduce Anna Nordberg to Layered Pages, and to be an early reader of her debut novel “When She Was Ours.” Stories about mothers and daughters are among my favorite stories to read. My review will be posted on the publish date.

Be sure to read below, what Nordberg has to say about what inspired her to write this story.

Stephanie

Expected Publication: August 1, 2026 by Lake Union Publishing

About the Book:

Thea Erickson, a renowned surgeon, is filled with both joy and grief as her family gathers at their home on a summer night in 1995. Her elder daughter Phoebe is getting married, but even the happiness of the day feels bittersweet, as Thea grapples with a terminal cancer diagnosis. She worries she won’t be around to support her younger daughter Astra, who’s still in college, but even Thea cannot foresee what is to come—a terrible accident the night of the wedding that changes Astra’s life forever.

In a last-ditch effort to protect her family, Thea arranges a secret meeting with an old family friend and extracts a promise that will reverberate long after she’s gone.

Years after her mother’s death, Astra has moved forward with a career and relationship, but she still struggles with her grief. When a man reaches out to her and Phoebe, offering a window into their mother’s past, Astra must make a choice, and her decision forces her to face what it means to love someone after they’re gone, who we decide to forgive, and how families reckon with the past.

From the Author:

The inspiration for the novel was my own experience with how loss unfolds in a life, and the way it rearranges the atoms of a family. My mother died when I was 17, and it felt like the first real thing that happened to me. The experience of grief was so different than I expected—there was tremendous anguish, of course, but there were all these other feelings—guilt, disorientation, even relief, because she had been suffering for such a long time. Then there were days I felt totally normal, because I was a teenager and adolescence is lived so in the present, and that, in a way, felt terrible too.

I wanted to try to write a novel that was as emotionally honest as possible, that showed the experience of loss over time from multiple points of view, including from the perspective of the person who was dying. And I wanted to write about a happy family going through a hard time. There is so much great literature about brittle families, and dysfunctional families, but I actually find happy families interesting.

Finally, I wanted this story to be hopeful. The thing I didn’t know when I was 17 was how much my mother would reveal herself in her absence. Decades later, when my own pregnancies went off the rails, one of the things that allowed me to stay calm and put one foot in front of the other was that I had watched my mother do this as she was sick, and so all of a sudden this grief, this old loss, became its own gift. That’s the thing about grief—it can have these surprising legacies; it can be a source of strength.

Author Bio:

Anna Nordberg is an author, journalist and culture writer whose essays have appeared in Slate magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She spent a lot of her childhood writing novels with a number 2 pencil on yellow legal pads. She actually still has these novels.

In 2015, she started writing a memoir about becoming a mother without her mom, who died when Anna was 17. This memoir never found a home, but its themes—how loss unfolds throughout a life, how we carry the memory of someone forward, the surprising legacy of grief—are all themes in Anna’s debut novel, When She Was Ours, out August 1.

Anna grew up in New York City and now lives in San Francisco with her husband, son and daughter, and English cocker spaniel, Guinness (who also loves books). She loves muddling through middle school with her kids, trying to remember what the formula for the circumference of a circle is, and rereading books like Tuck Everlasting and A Wrinkle in Time. Favorite books she has read to her kids: The Hobbit, The Dark is Rising, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and Bridge to Terabithia.

It was always her dream to write a novel after watching her mother write one on an ancient Apple IIC when Anna was eight years old. When She Was Ours is dedicated to her.