When She
Was Ours
Anna Nordberg’s upcoming novel, out June 23
When a joyful wedding turns to catastrophe, the Erickson family must make a series of life-altering decisions. In this fierce debut, Anna Nordberg looks at the ways loss unfolds in a life, the surprising legacy of grief, and what it means to love someone after they are gone.
About the book
Thea Erickson, a renowned surgeon, is filled with both joy and grief as her family gathers at their home on a summer night in 1995. Her elder daughter Phoebe is getting married, but even the happiness of the day feels bittersweet, as Thea grapples with a terminal cancer diagnosis. She worries she won’t be around to support her younger daughter Astra, who’s still in college, but even Thea cannot foresee what is to come—a terrible accident the night of the wedding that changes Astra’s life forever.
In a last-ditch effort to protect her family, Thea arranges a secret meeting with an old family friend and extracts a promise that will reverberate long after she’s gone.
Years after her mother’s death, Astra has moved forward with a career and relationship, but she still struggles with her grief. When a man reaches out to her and Phoebe, offering a window into their mother’s past, Astra must make a choice, and her decision forces her to face what it means to love someone after they’re gone, who we decide to forgive, and how families reckon with the past.
ABOUT ANNA NORDBERG
Anna Nordberg is a journalist and culture writer whose essays have appeared in Slate magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Before going freelance, she worked for over ten years as a magazine editor at Time Inc and Conde Nast. Before that, she spent a lot of her childhood writing novels with a number 2 pencil on yellow legal pads.
Anna has a B.A. in English from Yale University, where she also wrote a lot of fiction, this time on a computer. In 2015, she started writing a memoir about becoming a mother without her mom, who died when Anna was a teenager. This led to a focus in her writing on mothers and daughters, how loss unfolds throughout a life, and the vulnerability of being a parent with young children. While the memoir never found a home, Anna brought those themes into first novel, When She Was Ours, which will be published on June 23, 2026.
Anna grew up in New York City and now lives in San Francisco with her husband, son and daughter, and English cocker spaniel, Guinness (who also loves books). In addition to writing and reading novels, she loves the outdoors, hiking with the dog, making roast chicken with her son, taking dictation from her daughter who is working on a graphic novel about mice, and family movie night.
