I'll Give You The Sun by Jandy Nelson

This is a brilliant, luminous story of first love, family, loss and betrayal.

Jude and her twin brother, Noah, are incredibly close. At thirteen, isolated Noah draws constantly and is falling in love with the charismatic boy next door, while daredevil Jude cliff-dives and does the talking for both of them. But three years later, Jude and Noah are barely speaking. Something has happened to wreck the twins in different and dramatic ways.

The early years are Noah's story to tell. The later years are Jude's. What the twins don't realise is that they each have only half the story, and if they could just find their way back to one another, they’d have a chance to remake their world.

Jandy Nelson, like her characters in I’ll Give You the Sun and The Sky is Everywhere, comes from a superstitious lot. She was tutored from a young age in the art of the four-leaf clover hunt; she knocks wood, throws salt, and carries charms in her pockets.

Her critically-acclaimed, New York Times bestselling second novel, I’ll Give You the Sun, received the prestigious Printz Award in the US, the Bank Street's Josette Frank Award, and is a Stonewall Book Award honor. I'll Give You the Sun has been sold to Warner Brothers and screenwriter Natalie Krinsky is currently writing the adaptation.

Jandy, a literary agent for many years, received a BA from Cornell University and MFAs in Poetry and Children's Writing from Brown University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. Currently a full-time writer, she lives and writes in San Francisco, California—not far from the settings of her novels.

Q & A

When I write, I like . . .

...to turn off the lights, draw the curtains, put earplugs in, blast a sound machine, so the only light in the room is coming from my computer screen, which becomes this portal into the story. I was a little self-conscious of my lunatic working methods until I read that Kent Haruf wrote (typed!) blind-folded his whole life.

One thing that people don't know about me . . .

...Hmm, I can write with my toes in a pinch.

The book that inspired me to write is . . .

...truly impossible for me to pick one but my favorite novels of all time and so my greatest inspirations to this day are To the Lighthouse and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

My specialty dish in the kitchen is…

...Oh! So very glad you asked. My new novel is a lot about food so I’ve been cooking up a storm and have recently purchased a cast iron pot I’m convinced has magical powers. So far everything I’ve made in it—bread, roast chicken, Bolognese sauce—has come out delectable and generally I’m not near this good. I’d have to give the gold medal to this magic pot fettuccini Bolognese—the sauce lifted a whole table of dinner guests off the ground.

My current view is …

...an orange wall. Pretty much wherever I am in my house I now see an orange wall, all different glorious shades of orange. This is a recent change. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me.

The thing I love most about words is…

...their versatility, unpredictability, possibility, their texture and style and music and crackliness and unwieldy heartbeats, how they have hidden windows and doors and light switches and dark switches and detonators, how they change depending on who they’re with, how these little black specks on the page when arranged right allow us to transcend time, space, death, our own bodies and minds—it’s miraculous.