LISTEN TO CORABEL ON TODAY'S SHOW!
Corabel Shofner is a wife, mother, attorney, and author. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in English literature and was on Law Review at Vanderbilt University School of Law. Her shorter work has appeared or is forthcoming in Willow Review, Word Riot, Habersham Review, Hawai’i Review, Sou’wester, South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review, and Xavier Review. ALMOST PARADISE is her first novel. Find her on Twitter @corabel, or online at corabelshofner.com
Read her USA Today Q&A
Read her Guest Post on Trip Fiction
Read her Q&A on BookClubBabble
Read her Guest Post on Lifezette
In an interview, Sara will discuss:
Sardinian expat life
Italian food! Cooking, eating, and writing about both
How to create a romance without explicit scenes
How to be a full-time parent and a full-time writer
Her real life inspirations for the book
Best tips for Sardinian vacations
Her two upcoming novels, also set in Italy!
Her long acting career
ABOUT Almost Paradise
by Corabel Shofner Released on July 25, 2017
Twelve-year-old Ruby Clyde Henderson’s life turns upside down the day her mother’s boyfriend holds up a convenience store, and her mother is wrongly jailed for assisting with the crime. Ruby and her pet pig, Bunny, find their way to her estranged Aunt Eleanor’s home. Aunt Eleanor is an ornery nun who lives in the midst of a peach orchard on Paradise Ranch. With a little patience, she and Ruby begin to get along―but Eleanor has secrets of her own, secrets that might mean more hard times for Ruby.
Ruby believes that she’s the only one who can find a way to help heal her loved ones, save her mother, and bring her family back together. But being in a family means that everyone has to work together to support each other, and being home doesn’t always mean going back to where you came from. Corabel Shofner’s ALMOST PARADISE is a big-hearted novel about trust, belonging, and the struggles and joys of loving one another.
A Margaret Ferguson Book
Almost Paradise
by Corabel Shofner
Released on July 25, 2017
Twelve-year-old Ruby Clyde Henderson’s life turns upside down the day her mother’s boyfriend holds up a convenience store, and her mother is wrongly jailed for assisting with the crime. Ruby and her pet pig, Bunny, find their way to her estranged Aunt Eleanor’s home. Aunt Eleanor is an ornery nun who lives in the midst of a peach orchard on Paradise Ranch. With a little patience, she and Ruby begin to get along―but Eleanor has secrets of her own, secrets that might mean more hard times for Ruby.
Ruby believes that she’s the only one who can find a way to help heal her loved ones, save her mother, and bring her family back together. But being in a family means that everyone has to work together to support each other, and being home doesn’t always mean going back to where you came from. Corabel Shofner’s ALMOST PARADISE is a big-hearted novel about trust, belonging, and the struggles and joys of loving one another.
A Margaret Ferguson Book
Born in the early ‘50s as the youngest child of whimsical parents, Corabel Alexander Shofner was raised in a family of judges, farmers, and colorful women.
Brought up amidst formal tea parties and debutante balls of Jackson as well as the conflicting world of her wild Delta grandmother—who flew in the face of all convention—Corabel never learned to navigate the world of alcoholism, delusions of grandeur, and blatant paradoxes of her childhood. Somehow she missed the import of the civil rights movement which was happening right under her nose—in the middle of the social upheaval, at the age of 17, she simply hitchhiked away. After traveling around the world she landed in Manhattan, the first restful place she ever lived.
In the late ‘70s, after dating every single person in New York City, she enrolled in Columbia University and, though she had been a dismal student, a bright yellow window opened in her mind. She graduated with honors (magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa) after studying English Literature and Arabic.
She met and married a wonderful architect, Martin Shofner, who loved her exactly as she was. They moved to Nashville, Tennessee where she did well at the Vanderbilt University School of Law and reentered (more or less) “proper” society. She and Martin have three children. She likes to say that she took her retirement first and that is why she loves her ordinary life in the suburbs: she knows she’s not missing a damn thing.
She’s pleased to report that her first novel is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and her shorter work has appeared or is forthcoming in Word Riot, Willow Review Habersham Review, Hawai’i Review, Sou’wester, South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review, and Xavier Review.
She met and married a wonderful architect, Martin Shofner, who loved her exactly as she was. They moved to Nashville, Tennessee where she did well at the Vanderbilt University School of Law and reentered (more or less) “proper” society. She and Martin have three children. She likes to say that she took her retirement first and that is why she loves her ordinary life in the suburbs: she knows she’s not missing a damn thing.
She’s pleased to report that her first novel is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and her shorter work has appeared or is forthcoming in Word Riot, Willow Review Habersham Review, Hawai’i Review, Sou’wester, South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review, and Xavier Review.
