Readers and critics treasure No. 1 New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert for her award-winning books, which are filled with lyricism, richness and warmth. Although her nonfiction work catapulted her to global fame, Gilbert has been critically acclaimed throughout her career for her fiction, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Most recently, her novel The Signature of All Things was named a Best Book of 2013 by The New York Times, O Magazine, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine and The New Yorker.

Lauded for her magnetic storytelling, Gilbert has been described as “a keen and lyric observer, one who vaults easily from the minute to the universal” (NPR); “the epic poet of ecstasy” (The Boston Globe); and a writer “whose prose is fueled by a mix of intelligence, wit and colloquial exuberance that is close to irresistible” (The New York Times Book Review). All these qualities imbue Gilbert’s newest novel: “City of Girls” (Riverhead Books, June 2019).

Elizabeth Gilbert will be in Phoenix for an event with Changing Hands Bookstore at the Mesa Arts Center on June to celebrate the publication of her new novel, “City of Girls.”

“City of Girls” is a dazzling novel about glamour, adventure, liberation, and friendship set in the glittering New York City theater world during the 1940s. Told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her glory days, the novel shows how one young woman realized, over the course of her life, that one doesn’t have to be a “good girl” to be a good person, and that a fulfilling life doesn’t require a traditional path. As New York Magazine says, “Gilbert’s fiction—especially as it deals with the unlikely routes women take when the familial mold is shattered—is where it’s really at.” Filled with showgirls, playboys, and prose that is positively vivacious, the book sweeps readers up in this gin-soaked world, one which celebrates human desire and an appetite for living large.

As Gilbert herself says, “Never has it felt more important for me to tell stories of joy and abandon, love and recklessness. Life is short and difficult, people. We must take our pleasures wherever we can find them… So take a break from your troubles, dear ones, and drink it up.”