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Contemporary & Women’s Fiction

Gina Sorell

Writing Coach

Gina Sorell is the author of The Wise Women (HarperCollins), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, Good Morning America Buzz Book, a People Magazine Best New Book Pick, and Washington Post Summer Selection. Her debut novel, Mothers and Other Strangers, was a Refinery29 and Self Magazine Best Book Pick.

Gina Sorell returned to her first love—writing—after two decades of working as an actor on stage, screen and television. She is the author of The Wise Women (HarperCollins), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, Good Morning America Buzz Book, Read with Jenna and Parade Magazine’s Most Anticipated of 2022, a People Magazine Best New Book Pick, and Washington Post Summer Selection. Her debut novel, Mothers and Other Strangers, was a Refinery29 and Self Magazine Best Book Pick of 2017, a Great Group Read, and an Indigo Best For Book Clubs selection. Her writing has appeared in Dame Magazine, LitHub, Good Housekeeping, Refinery29 and the Globe and Mail.

Gina’s decades of experience in the arts and as a brand storyteller have given her a unique insight into the dual worlds of writing and publishing, art and business. A warm and compassionate coach, she understands firsthand how challenging and rewarding writing can be. Thanks in part to her years as a member of the Second City Touring Company and Mainstage, she can think quickly on her feet, offering story suggestions that help writers get unstuck and inspired.

Having lived in New York and Los Angeles, she currently resides in Toronto with her family, happily writing away at her desk, an ever-present thermos of coffee near her side.

I spend a lot of time thinking and walking and getting inside my characters’ heads, trying to see the world through their eyes. I improvise dialogue they’d say and conversations they’d engage in, and wonder about the people that really lived beneath the exterior they presented.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

Novels by

Gina Sorell

Mothers and Other Strangers

My father proposed to my mother at gunpoint when she was nineteen, and knowing that she was already pregnant with a dead man’s child, she accepted.

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‍Thus begins this spellbinding story of Elsie’s journey toward understanding her late mother, a narcissist who left her only child an inheritance of debts and mysteries. A dancer in Los Angeles, Elsie was estranged from her mother for years. But now she’s back in Toronto, trying to piece together the shards that remain of her mother’s life.

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Meanwhile, she must cope with threats that come—or so she suspects—from The Seekers, the cult-like spiritual program to which her mother belonged. Undaunted, Elsie works to unravel the message her dying mother left for her, which ultimately takes her to the South African family homestead she never knew existed.

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The Wise Women

Popular advice columnist Wendy Wise has been skillfully advising the women who write to her seeking help for four decades, so why are her own daughters’ lives such a mess?

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Clementine, the working mother of a six-year-old boy, has just discovered that she is actually renting the Queens home that she thought she owned, because her husband Steve secretly funneled their money into his flailing start-up. Meanwhile, her sister Barb has overextended herself at her architecture firm and reunited semi-unhappily with her cheating girlfriend.

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When Steve goes MIA and Clementine receives an eviction notice, Wendy swoops in to save the day, even though her daughters, who are holding onto some resentments from childhood, haven’t asked for her help. But as soon as Wendy sets her sights on hunting down her rogue son-in-law, Barb and Clementine quickly discover that their mother has been hiding more than a few problems of her own.

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As the three women confront the disappointments and heartaches that have accumulated between them over the years, they discover that while the future may look entirely different from the one that they’ve expected, it may be even brighter than they’d hoped.

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