The multimillion-copy bestselling modern classic of autobiographical fiction about a young woman's struggle with mental health, featuring a new foreword by Esmé Weijun Wang, the New York Times bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias, and a new afterword by the author

Also available from Penguin Classics: Joanne Greenberg's bestselling modern classic In This Sign

After making an attempt on her own life, sixteen-year-old Deborah Blau is diagnosed with schizophrenia. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a psychiatric hospital many hours from her home in suburban Chicago. Here she will spend the next three years, trying, with the help of a gifted psychiatrist, to find a path back to her normal life, and to emerge from the imaginary Kingdom of Yr in which she has sought refuge.

A semiautobiographical novel originally published under the pen name Hannah Green just a year after Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar--a very different portrait of psychological breakdown--I Never Promised You a Rose Garden remains, more than half a century later, a timeless and ultimately hopeful book, ripe for rediscovery by a new generation eager to erase the stigma of mental illness.

For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The bestselling modern classic by the author of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden about a deaf couple, their hearing child, and the bond they create through sign language, featuring a new introduction by Sara Novic, author of the New York Times bestseller True Biz, and a new afterword by the author

Astute and wholly authentic . . . This novel isn't only one of deaf hardship, but also one of bravery and great joy. . . . Over the course of it, I was often as gripped . . . as I am while reading a thriller. --Sara Novic, from the Introduction

A Penguin Classic

Abel and Janice meet at a school for the deaf. Sign language brings them together, enabling them to survive and, indeed, to forge a love too powerful to be broken by the world into which they were born. Spanning forty years, from the late 1920s to the early 1960s, In This Sign follows the lives of Abel, Janice, and their hearing daughter, Margaret, as they contend uneasily with the Outside--a world designed, often purposely, to be inhospitable to those like them.

First published in 1970, only a decade after ASL's formal recognition as a language and well before the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, In This Sign stands out as a rare, compassionate portrait of the deaf community.

For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Joanne Greenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York and was graduated from American University, Washington, D.C., with a major in anthropology and English literature.

In 1955, she married Albert Greenberg, who encouraged her to write her first book, The King's Persons, an account of the York Massacre at York Castle in 1190.

The novel received the Harry and Ethel Daroff Memorial Fiction Award as well as the Jewish Book Council of America award.

This has been followed by 15 novels and four collections of short stories. Her most famous work is the classic I Never Promised You A Rose Garden, which was adapted into a 1977 movie and a 2004 play of the same name.

Her novel In This Sign was made into a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie called Love Is Never Silent.

Joanne lives in a mountaintop home near Lookout Mountain, Colorado. She and Albert were married for 67 years. Albert passed in 2022. Their two sons are grown.

Joanne writes daily, tutors in Latin and Hebrew, was a Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Fiction Writing at the Colorado School of Mines, and is active in the Beth Evergreen congregation, conducting Bar Mitzvah preparation as well as other involvements. She is a frequent participant in writers' seminars and workshops. Additionally, she performs as a storyteller, helping to keep this art-and the stories-alive.

In this memoir, she describes her years as a volunteer EMT with her local fire department in the Colorado Rockies.

In its nuanced portrait of a middle-aged suburbanite and his family, APPEARANCES challenges easy assumptions about the nature of kinship and selfhood, of crime and punishment, of appearance and reality. Steven Howe-Boomer, lawyer, family man-has settled into midlife contentment. Then, unexpectedly, Steven finds himself doubly shaken by something that a data search uncovers. Steven's father, Alonzo Lon Howe-long assumed to have died in 1958-is, in fact, still alive. And he is incarcerated in the Colorado State Penitentiary, two hours' drive south of where Steven lives in Denver. What follows is a series of revelations that shake Steven's perceptions of himself, his family, and his marriage. Unafraid of risking controversy in the pursuit of insight into the human condition, APPEARANCES is Joanne Greenberg's finest, most challenging, and most compassionate novel.

In the isolated ski-resort town of Gold Flume, longtime Sheriff Jay Isaacs, prepares to confront three teens for a condo break-in. On his way to the county seat of Aureole, with the teens in custody in the dead of winter, an earthquake shakes the mountain and creates an avalanche which seals off the small town from the rest of civilization.

No passage out of town, no electricity, no Wi-Fi. And with the spring melt, the town will soon be underwater. In Joanne Greenberg's Jubilee Year, the world is flipped upside down as the town must revert to the old days and old skills to survive a brutal winter with no electricity, no Wi-Fi, no cell phones, no modern conveniences. It's a clash of culture, values, age and youth, as a divided town must come together to survive.

Joanne Greenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, and was graduated from American University, Washington, D.C., with a major in anthropology and English literature. She also studied at the University of London and the University of Colorado.

In 1955, she married Albert Greenberg, who encouraged her to write her first book, The King's Persons, an account of the York Massacre. This has been followed by 15 novels and four collections of short stories. Her most famous work is the classic I Never Promised You A Rose Garden which was adapted into a 1977 movie and a 2004 play of the same name.

Her book, In This Sign, was made into a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie called Love Is Never Silent.

From girlhood through middle age, Rachel and Miri -- two Jewish women living in Colorado -- struggle to sustain a complex, often competitive friendship throughout the challenges that arise over many decades. Miri's young daughter, Tamar, initially appears to offer the long-time friends a link that will strengthen their uneasy bond. But when Tamar develops a passion for a dangerous sport even before the girl reaches puberty, Rachel and Miri's friendship faces a test more severe than any the women have ever experienced.

Lily Higgins Beausoleil, respected mother, grandmother, bank employee and upstanding citizen of bucolic Gold Flume, has passed. A suicide no one will mention. Now the grieving family and town is turned upside down as her secret life is slowly uncovered.

Joanne Greenberg, renowned author of the classic, I Never promised You a Rose Garden, spins an intriguing tale of family, betrayal, false appearances, and a stained family legacy in this, her 20th novel. All I Have Done For You is told from the perspective of Lily's ghost as she watches her family and town struggle through her betrayal, the false veneers, and finally, the ultimate truth.

From the award-winning author of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Joanne Greenberg presents a poignant novel of family whose love and courage enable them to survive in the silent world of the deaf.

Abel and Janice Ryder began their married life together with all the hopes and dreams of a young couple deeply in love. But before long they realize that their deafness stands as an immense barrier between them and a society that seems to work only for those who can hear.

Inexperienced, ignorant, and bewildered, Abel and Janice leave the harsh environment of a school for the disabled and enter the insensitive world of the hearing. Through years of debt and misunderstanding, hard and degrading work, the raising of a hearing daughter, common tragedies and joys, they learn that the remarkable tool of sign language enables them to survive and, indeed, to forge a love too powerful to be broken by the painful, extraordinary world into which they were born.

Spanning four generations, In This Sign is the story of one family's struggle to carve a place for itself out of the tides of wealth, war, and human strivings in America.

Lily Higgins Beausoleil, respected mother, grandmother, bank employee and upstanding citizen of bucolic Gold Flume, has passed. A suicide no one will mention. Now the grieving family and town is turned upside down as her secret life is slowly uncovered.

Joanne Greenberg, renowned author of the classic, I Never promised You a Rose Garden, spins an intriguing tale of family, betrayal, false appearances, and a stained family legacy in this, her 20th novel. All I Have Done For You is told from the perspective of Lily's ghost as she watches her family and town struggle through her betrayal, the false veneers, and finally, the ultimate truth.