Nobody Will Tell You This but Me

By: Bess Kalb

Narrated by: Bess Kalb

A brilliantly original memoir of a grandmother speaking to her granddaughter from beyond the grave, telling the story of her life with hilarious candor and love.

Bess Kalb has saved every voicemail message her grandmother - her best friend, her confidante - ever left her until the day she died.

In this wildly imaginative memoir, Bobby Bell's voice is still in Bess's head. Stubborn, glamorous, larger than life, she gives Bess critical advice on everything and tells the history that made them both. Beginning with her mother's escape from the pogroms of Belarus in the 1880s to the rambunctiously cramped Brooklyn apartment where Bobby was born, it swings through her loving marriage, blazes over the rebellious youth of her daughter and finally - falls madly in love with her granddaughter, Bess.

Nobody Will Tell You This But Me are the truths - full of devotion, killer instincts and hard-won experience - that Bess's grandmother tells even when they hurt - and even though she's gone.

This unusual love story celebrates the bond of women across generations and the personalities that live on through grief and love. Told through documents, photographs, and verbatim dialogue, it's a memoir like none you've ever read before.

©2020 Bess Kalb (P)2020 Hachette Audio UK

Critic reviews

I LOVED THIS BOOK MORE THAN I CAN SAY - NIGELLA LAWSON

I HAVE NOT BEEN AS PROFOUNDLY MOVED BY A BOOK IN YEARS - JODI PICOULT

Get your tissues on the ready

Beautifully written and narrated. It was very touching and I sometimes had to pause it as I found my mind wandering back to memories with my own late grandmother. Many tears were cried, for their story and the memories it brought up.