Leah Hager Cohen

House Lights
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From the jacket:
Late in her twentieth year, Beatrice mails a letter on the sly, sparking events that will change her life forever. The addressee is her grandmother, a legendary stage actress long estranged from her daughter, Bea’s mother. Though Bea wants to become an actress herself, it is the desire to understand the old family rift that drives her to work her way into her grandmother’s graces.
But just as she establishes a precarious foothold in her grandmother’s world, Bea’s elite Boston home life begins to crumble. Her beloved father is accused of sexual harassment by one of his graduate students; her usually serene, self-certain mother shows signs of fallibility. And Bea is falling in love with someone many would consider inappropriate.
Powerfully written and psychologically complex, House Lights illuminates the corrosive power of family secrets, and the redemptive struggle to find truth, forgiveness, and love.

With memorable characters, vivid settings, and an honest and true voice, Leah Hager Cohen explores and exposes the secrets of one family, and how far reaching and powerful secrets can be. One family, yes. But every reader will shiver in recognition and rejoice in how love ultimately heals and triumphs.
Ann Hood, THE KNITTING CIRCLE

Simply - gorgeous. It's rare to find a novel that so elevates itself in the end, that achieves an emotional resolution without a contrived tidiness and with a narrative power that seems inevitable but not predictable...The final scene between father and daughter is wholly free of melodramatic rapprochement. Cohen allows Beatrice a more complex and delicate emotional shift - one that "does not preclude compassion." Allowing herself to feel that compassion - both for her father and for herself - is Beatrice's most liberating act, the final rejection of secrecy and mythology. By novel's end, Cohen has given us a very real story that honors both of these epically flawed characters - and our own flawed need to love.
The Los Angeles Times

When I turned the last page of this beguiling novel, I felt sadder than I remember feeling in years. Not saddened by the ending itself but by the fact that I might have to wait another decade to find a story that so thoroughly engages the mind and heart at once. My only solace was to re-read it immediately.
The Courier-Journal, Louisville
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This latest novel from Cohen is a hit.
Library Journal

The tension between honesty and kindness in our most intimate relationships permeates Leah Hager Cohen's insightful and beautifully written HOUSE LIGHTS. When the "house lights" come up in the theatre, we see each other as we are instead of the artful public display on stage. This novel illumines not only its characters but our lives. Among many interesting issues, this novel explores the role of forgiveness in the individual's need for self determination. While depicting the story of Beatrice's unidealized and difficult passage from home to world, Cohen offers a compelling novel of special emotional and intellectual value. I've been enriched by reading this book.
Sena Jeter Naslund, AHAB'S WIFE and ABUNDANCE: A NOVEL OF MARIE ANTOINETTE

Graceful, compassionate, and often unnervingly perceptive, HOUSE LIGHTS explores that most familiar yet most mysterious subject, the dysfunctional family. And this particular family has seemed perfect for so long that the shock of its imperfections are all the more jarring--especially for the shrewd but vulnerable young daughter. Who are the parents she thought she knew? Can children ever forgive parents they don't understand? Leah Hager Cohen asks such haunting questions, and answers them with this astute portrait of a highly "civilized" family plunged into a crisis that is anything but civil.
Suzanne Berne, A CRIME IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD and THE GHOST AT THE TABLE

Intelligent and searching...a coming-of-age novel that casts a distinctly female eye on the form, not asking how far it's possible to travel from one's original self so much as considering the possibility that we may never really leave our child selves behind...House Lights is artfully constructed. By virtue of their length, novels forgive undisciplined descriptive flights, but Cohen writes with the scrupulousness of someone fashioning a short story, in which even the smallest details must bear their weight of significance.
The New York Times Book Review
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~ A New York Times Notable Book for 2007 ~

In this excellent novel...Cohen suggests that real love almost always runs counter to the conveniences of society.
The Washington Post

Cohen offers lyrical prose, a remarkable voice and a wealth of insights.
Seattle Times

Tantalizing in its evocation of emotional fragility and piercing in its interpretation of subconscious desires, Cohen's captivating family drama thrums with a sensitive authenticity that is all the more provocative thanks to its poignant lyricism.
Booklist

Leah Cohen writes from deep within the human psyche, her observations wonderfully precise and startlingly universal, so that her many small truths accrue into larger ones. This lyrical meditation is about love, forgiveness, loneliness, ambition, secrecy, and desire, and is imbued with compassion, tenderness, and heartbreaking wisdom.
Andrew Solomon, THE NOONDAY DEMON and A STONE BOAT

With an eye as piercing as it is forgiving, Leah Hager Cohen looks at the past’s grip upon the present and how the self - stung and stinging - keeps muddling through, propelled by love. This is a dazzling novel, remarkable for how it shines with deep intelligence of both the mind and heart.
Elizabeth Graver, UNRAVELLING and AWAKE

The reader who follows the main character, young Beatrice, into the arc light of this absorbing story - into Leah Hager Cohen's ceremonious, urgent prose - will no doubt come out wiser, stronger, and ready to act in the world. What more could we ask of a novel?
Deborah Larsen, THE WHITE and THE TULIP AND THE POPE

Leah Hager Cohen writes with such precision, intelligence, and grace it is astonishing. Not only is it a pleasure to read her, it's a privilege.
Elizabeth Berg, THE HANDMAID AND THE CARPENTER and DREAM WHEN YOU'RE FEELING BLUE