Eight Hundred Grapes

There are secrets you share, and secrets you hide… A heartbreaking, funny, and deeply evocative novel about love, marriage, family, wine, and the treacherous terrain in which they meet.

For everyone who loved Brothers and Sisters.

My mother said it simply: ‘Be careful what you give up’
‘Because you can’t get it back?’
‘No.’ She squeezed my shoulder. ‘Because, eventually, you get it back any way you can.’

Georgia Ford, associate at a lop LA law firm, has built a solid life for herself away from her childhood spent in the beautiful surroundings of her parents’ Californian vineyard. The life of a winemaker was too precarious, too heartbreaking and unpredictable for her.

But just a week before her wedding to her beloved Ben, a secret is revealed that changes everything.

Returning to the family vineyard, Georgia just wants to throw herself into the grape harvest with her long-married parents, her inseparable twin brothers, and everything familiar. But the foundations of Georgia’s ideas about love and happiness are shaken as she realises that her parents’ long marriage is not quite the picture perfect relationship she had always assumed it was. And neither is her brothers’ easy-going camaraderie.

As the last harvest draws to a close, Georgia discovers that in the time she’s been away, the vineyard has settled into a rhythm of its own, and it’s the people who tend to it who are struggling to keep their roots.

In ways she never imagined, her whole life is unravelling, and it’s up to Georgia to bring everyone through the storm…

Reviews

‘Laura Dave writes with humour and insight about relationships in all their complexity, whether she’s describing siblings or fiancés or a couple long-married…a captivating story about the power of family, the limitations of love, and what becomes of a life’s work’ J. Courtney Sullivan, Maine

About the author

After graduating with an MFA from the University of Virginia, international bestselling author Laura Dave worked as a freelance journalist for ESPN, before turning to writing. Her novels, Eight Hundred Grapes, The First Husband, The Divorce Party and London is the Best City in America, have been published in fifteen countries and optioned as major motion pictures.

Dave's writing has appeared in The New York Times, Glamour and Cosmopolitan. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband.