NEWS

Random House To Publish a New Memoir by Tara Westover, #1 NYT Bestselling Author of EDUCATED

Random House, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, will publish BROTHERS AND SISTERS, a new memoir by Tara Westover, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the global phenomenon EDUCATED, on April 13, 2027.

U.S. rights were acquired from Deneen Howell at Williams & Connolly, LLP, it was announced today by Andy Ward, Publisher of Random House. BROTHERS AND SISTERS will be published in the U.S. as a Random House Hardcover and ebook. An audiobook edition will be released simultaneously by Penguin Random House Audio.

In BROTHERS AND SISTERS, Tara Westover delivers an intimate and moving account of how memories are held in a family, especially between siblings. Westover grew up at the base of a mountain in Idaho. Then she left the mountain and wrote the story. She wrote about her father’s junkyard and being kept out of school, the family’s preparations for the End of Days and the confusion she felt when an older brother became violent. Then she published the story under the title EDUCATED.

The world believed her, but her parents hired a lawyer. What followed was a battle over the past. Who gets to say what happened? Who gets to be believed? And the most difficult question: how do you believe yourself when your own parents say you’re lying?

Westover was able to believe herself because two of her brothers believed her. They vindicated her memories and affirmed her right to narrate what she remembered. “There is a gift siblings can give to one another,” she writes. “It is the gift of a witness.”

But the gift didn’t last. The book became a phenomenon, and soon after, her brothers denied events that they had once confirmed, or they confirmed the events but denied their meaning. Perhaps there hadn’t been any violence, or perhaps the violence had been mild. Westover was believed by millions, but she was not believed by her own family.

BROTHERS AND SISTERS is a story of how memories are held in a family. How someone can know you are telling the truth but still say you are lying. Ultimately, it is a story of what it means to grow up—to outlive the story that made you.

“It’s hard to believe it has been almost ten years since we published EDUCATED,” Ward says. “And what a pleasure it is to be back in Tara’s hands, to be reacquainted with that inimitable voice. BROTHERS AND SISTERS is deep, beautiful and stark—and in the end, I think, redemptive. Hard but redemptive. It makes you look at your own life and wonder: who would I be without a witness?”

Tara Westover is an American historian and memoirist. Her first book, EDUCATED, was a finalist for several national awards, including the L.A. Times Book Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The New York Times named EDUCATED one of the 10 Best Books of 2018, and the American Booksellers Association voted EDUCATED the Nonfiction Book of the Year. In 2019, Time named Westover one of the 100 Most Influential People. Westover holds a PhD in intellectual history from Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 2019 she was the Rosenthal Writer in Residence at Harvard University. In 2023, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden.