blasberg, Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg

Days after graduating from college, Betsabé Ruiz begins her first job on Wall Street, where she plans to save enough money to eventually pursue her dreams of becoming a theatre actress. What she didn’t anticipate was that this job would allow her barely enough free time to sleep or hang out with friends, let alone take acting classes. She didn’t apprehend the magnitude of the wealth that would be swirling about her, either, or how the long hours and close quarters would infuse her professional relationships with intimacy. Still, she does her best to navigate this uncharted territory at work, where she makes an unlikely best friend and develops an unexpected attraction to her boss.

Told in the retrospective as a letter to her unborn son, Daughter of a Promise is a coming-of-age tale in which a naïve Betsabé assumed leaving her past behind was the prerequisite for succeeding as an adult. The wisdom she ultimately passes on to her child, however, is steeped in the very traditions within which her grandmother raised her back in Miami.

A modern retelling of the legend of Bathsheba and David, this novel is a reminder that the biological forces of desire and love are timeless and complicated.

Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg

Jeanne Blasberg is an award-winning and bestselling author and essayist. Her novel The Nine (SWP 2019) was honored with the 2019 Foreword Indies Gold Award in Thriller & Suspense and the Gold Medal and Juror’s Choice in the 2019 National Indie Excellence Awards. Eden (SWP 2017), her debut, won the Benjamin Franklin Silver Award for Best New Voice in Fiction and was a finalist for the Sarton Women’s Book Award for Historical Fiction. Her forthcoming novel, Daughter of a Promise (SWP, April 2, 2024) is a modern retelling of the legend of David and Bathsheba, completing the thematic trilogy she began with Eden and The Nine.

Jeanne cochairs the board of the Boston Book Festival and serves on the Executive Committee of GrubStreet, one of the country’s preeminent creative writing centers. Jeanne was named a Southampton Writer’s Conference BookEnds Fellow in April 2021. She reviews contemporary fiction for the New York Journal of Books, When not in New England, she splits her time between Park City, UT, and growing organic vegetables in Verona, Wisconsin.