To keep her fifteen-year-old son safe from the everyday temptations of New York City–namely sex, drugs, and all-night clubs–single mom Lily Davis decides it’s time she and Sam move to Sakonnet Bay, a picturesque town on the Long Island coast with a much slower pace. Or so she thinks.

For Sam makes a friend who speaks only in Klingon–and before you can say wejpuh, they’re having sex on the kitchen table. Lily lands a great job as a columnist for the local paper, but the folks in town are gossiping about her run-in with a nipping dog and police sergeant Tom McKee. Most disturbing, there’s the undeniable attraction between Lily and the very married McKee. And when she and Tom stumble upon what appears to be a dead woman in a house they’re . . . well . . . trespassing in, Lily’s picture-postcard world begins to peel at the edges. How much passion, guilt, and murder can one woman take?

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"Compassionate, funny, and tremendously satisfying... Ephron's comic timing is flawless... Hanging Up is full of life and, ultimately... love."
—The New York Times Book Review

"Delia Ephron is blessed with the driest of wits, the tenderest of hearts, and an uncanny ear for the way people really talk.  Do yourself a favor and curl up with Hanging Up -- but unplug the phone first."
—Armistead Maupin

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A New York Times Best Seller
One of People Magazine's Top 10 Books of 2016
Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2016 (Fiction)

An electrifying novel about marriage and deceit from bestselling author Delia Ephron that follows two couples on vacation in Siracusa, a town on the coast of Sicily, where the secrets they have hidden from each other are exposed and relationships are unraveled.

New Yorkers Michael, a famous writer, and Lizzie, a journalist, travel to Italy with their friends from Maine - Finn, his wife Taylor, and their daughter Snow.  "From the beginning," says Taylor, "it was a conspiracy for Lizzie and Finn to be together." Told Rashomon-style in alternating points of view, the characters expose and stumble upon lies and infidelities past and present.  Snow, ten years old and precociously drawn into a far more adult drama, becomes the catalyst for catastrophe as the novel explores collusion and betrayal in marriage. With her inimitable psychological astuteness, and uncanny understanding of the human heart, Ephron delivers a powerful meditation on marriage, friendship, and the meaning of travel. Set on the sun-drenched coast of the Ionian Sea, Siracusa unfolds with the pacing of a psychological thriller and delivers an unexpected final act that none can see coming.

Advance Praise–

SIRACUSA is an Italian aria, a Greek tragedy and a modern American masterpiece written by Delia Ephron at the height of her powers. This is a story of two complicated marriages, one vulnerable child and a trip to Italy that changes each of their lives forever. Secrets, lies, love raging, love dying and the shame of unrealized potential are exposed in detail under the Sicilian sun. And, like the Moro blood oranges that grow there with abandon, the taste is both sour and sweet at once, but the bitterness that remains is not only haunting but unforgettable.
—Adriana Trigiani

Delia Ephron’s Siracusa is a stunning portrait of two marriages coming unraveled during the stress of travel abroad. Insightful and engaging. A must read!
—Sue Grafton

This book happened because of an anxiety attack.

I was worried about something… something that I knew wasn’t going to be resolved for a while, and I thought how can I ever get through this?  And that night when I went to sleep, I had a dream.  

A most vivid dream about three women and a lion.  I knew exactly how the women were dressed probably because I had been thinking about nothing but women and clothes because of our playLove Loss and What I Wore.

Lana was wearing ripped jeans, a t-shirt and those flat plastic shoes called Jellies.  Tracee was in a wedding dress and veil.  I knew Lana and Tracee were in their twenties, best friends from childhood, and there was an older women with them, who, when I woke up, I named Rita.  Lana, Tracee and Rita were in a strange place—a roadhouse, perhaps a seedy nightclub, built of all different construction materials hammered every which way.  Living inside this odd looking roadhouse by the side of a rural highway in North Carolina (a state I had never visited in my life) was the bar’s mascot—Marcel, the lion.

When I woke up, I wondered for a second if what I dreamed was real.  Then I knew it was my next novel.   For the two years I lived inside this world -- three women on the run, each with secrets, each with transgressions, real and imagined -- and the lion who would change their lives.

When I write, I can block out anything, well, almost everything—and writing this, living in this world, got me calmly through that anxiety attack, a situation resolved in  a month, and several more actually.  It took two years to write the book.

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