Bestselling Author  │ Novelist  │ Short Story Writer
 
Alice Hoffman has been called “America’s literary heir to the Brothers Grimm” and her luminous and remarkable “fables of the everyday” have enchanted readers since the publication of her first novel, Property Of, in 1977.  More than 30 years later, with numerous acclaimed and bestselling novels (as well as two short story collections and many books for young adults), Hoffman continues to seduce readers into her vividly imagined world.  
 
Hoffman “has a penchant for a near-gothic strangeness and enchantment on the edges of everyday experience” (Jack Sullivan, Washington Post Book World).  Her storytelling has the air of a fairy tale and calls to mind the writings of such magical realists as Gabriel García  Márquez, Isabel Allende, and New England fabulist Washington Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow).  
 
"Magic in fiction is a long tradition. One of the reasons we like fables and fairy tales is that they’re emotionally true, and page-turners at the same time."
 
—Alice Hoffman
 
Often drawn to the story of the outcast and the lonely oddball, Hoffman explains, “My theory is that everyone, at one time or another, has been at the fringe of society in some way: an outcast in high school, a stranger in a foreign country, the best at something, the worst at something, the one who’s different. Looking at it this way, being an outsider is the one thing we all have in common.”
 
Hoffman is a master at forging miracles from the quotidian and the ordinary.  While she explores life’s common struggles—people living in small towns in Massachusetts or Long Island puzzling through essential questions about relationships and intimacy, family and identity, love and survival—she sets her tales in a world that is at once wholly recognizable and at times fantastic.  Her protagonists inhabit a universe in which everyday objects—necklaces, river pebbles, birds, old overcoats, roses—become talismans that haunt and guide them as they navigate their way to a deeper understanding of themselves.
 
Hoffman “leaves the reader with an almost bewildered sense that this primal mythological level does exist in everyday reality, and that there is no event, from the standard miracle of childbirth to the most bizarre magic imaginable, that cannot occur in a setting of familiar, everyday details” (Perri Klass, The New York Times Book Review).

The New York Times best-seller The Dovekeepers is her most ambitious and mesmerizing novel, a tour de force of imagination and research, set in ancient Israel. It has been heralded by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison as "beautiful, harrowing, a major contribution to twenty-first-century literature."

Some of Hoffman’s other beloved titles include Here On Earth—a modern reworking of Emily Brontë’s masterpiece Wuthering Heights, which was an Oprah Book Club selection in 1998—and Practical Magic, which was made into a movie starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. Other popular titles include Blackbird House, Blue Diary, The Probable Future, The River King, Turtle Moon, At Risk and The Third Angel.  

Hoffman’s fertile imagination extends well beyond the confines of adult literature. She has enthralled children and teens with her many young adult titles, and more are certainly in the works.