Description: When Liz Millanova meets two unlikely friends in a support group for stage four cancer patients, they ditch the group and form their own, aiming to enjoy life while they can. In the process, they help one another reach acceptance, resolve family issues, and find love and peace at the end of their lives.
Brief description: Ann Bancroft was an Army brat who settled in Sacramento as an adult after attending ten schools in seven cities and four states. As a reporter, she worked in the State Capitol bureaus of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Associated Press. An alumni of the Community of Writers, the Tomales Bay Writers Workshops, and Everwood Farmstead artist's residency, she has ghostwritten two nonfiction books and was the cowriter, with Father Dan Madigan, of Many Hands, Many Miracles. She's written personal essays for the former Open Salon and Cure Magazine, and her writing has appeared twice in A Year in Ink, the annual anthology of San Diego Writers, Ink. Almost Family is her debut novel, published at age seventy-one. Ann and her husband split their time between Sacramento and Coronado, California.
Review Quotes: "Almost Family by Ann Bancroft is most certainly a literary masterpiece. . . . There was so much to be felt, learned, experienced, and savored in this narrative. . . . Each character was beautifully, intelligently portrayed and intensely believable."
--Readers' Favorite, 5-star review
--Kirkus Reviews "Almost Family is a book that comes right at the hard stuff with a whole lot of truth and even more humor. Ann Bancroft writes a beautiful story about love and the power of friendship to heal what the doctors can't."
--Jodi Angel, author of You Only Get Letters from Jail and Biggest Little Girl "I found Ann Bancroft's bracingly honest novel about three ordinary people wrestling with the end of life impossible to put down. Who would have guessed that dancing on the edge could be so much fun?"
--Hugh Delehanty, coauthor with Phil Jackson of the #1 New York Times bestseller Eleven Rings