Fox, Lauren

Lauren Fox is the author of Days of Awe: A Novel, Still Life with Husband: A Novel, and Friends Like Us: A Novel. Her work has also appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Psychology Today, and Salon. Send for Me: A Novel (Vintage), which Fox based on letters from her own family, is a work of historical fiction that moves between Germany on the eve of World War II and present-day Wisconsin. Annelise works at her parents’ bakery in Feldenheim, Germany. Anti-Jewish sentiment is rising, but she and her parents can’t believe that it will affect them. Annelise marries and gives birth to her daughter as threats to Jews become more dangerous. She and her family set off for America, but they must leave behind her parents, whose future and safety are uncertain. Two generations later, in a small Midwestern city, Annelise’s granddaughter, Clare, stumbles upon her grandmother’s letters from Germany. The history of her family’s sacrifices is placed in a new light, and suddenly she faces an impossible choice: the past or her future. Kirkus praised it as “subtle, striking, and punctuated by snippets of family letters. Fox has imbued this deeply personal, ultimately hopeful novel … with emotion, empathy, and an essential understanding of … the importance of reckoning with the past in order to embrace the future.”