The author
Sonja Roberts
Book-club fiction that holds a laugh and a genuine grief in the same breath.
Photo by Heather HenriksenSonja Roberts writes the kind of novel a book club stays late to argue about. Her debut, Which Face Is True, arrives from Inkshares on March 16, 2027.
She came to fiction the long way around. At Wells College, on the shores of Cayuga Lake, she studied theater and dance and minored in creative writing. The years that followed ran from regional theater to a stretch as a magician’s assistant in Las Vegas casinos. An empty bank account eventually steered her into corporate America. The itch for a creative outlet led her back to the page.
That mix of stage timing and hard-won realism runs all through her writing. Her narrators tend to be funny in the places you brace for sad, and clear-eyed about the ways people lie to the ones they love, themselves included. In Which Face Is True the narrator is a scholar of literary adultery who misses the affair in her own marriage, which is either the best joke in the book or the saddest thing in it, depending on the page.
Sonja now lives in Maine. When she is not writing novels she keeps an essay blog and a Substack, where she writes about books, the writing life, and the small strange business of being a person.
“A wry grief-com about secrets, scandals, and gutted houses.”Sonja, on her debut
The writing life
Where the work happens.
Sonja writes from the coast of Maine, though the Finger Lakes she loved during her Wells College days still fill every page of Which Face Is True. Her essays and newsletter pick up where the novel leaves off.