Love Brought Me Back: A Journey of Loss and Gain »

Over the past four decades, Natalie Cole has performed the world over, won multiple Grammys, and sold tens of millions of records in the genres of R&B, pop, and jazz. She is perhaps best known for her 1991 album, Unforgettable . . . with Love, featuring her vocal arrangements of her father's greatest hits with piano accompaniment by her uncle Ike Cole, which won several Grammy awards, including Album of the Year and Best Traditional Pop Vocal Performance.

As an actress, she starred in director Delbert Mann’s “Lily in Winter” and co-starred with Laurence Fishburn and Cicely Tyson in Walter Mosley’s “Always Outnumbered.” She played herself in “Livin’ For Love: The Natalie Cole Story,” the biopic of her life, which aired on NBC. Natalie has made more than 300 major television appearances, from dramas like “Law and Order” and “Touched by an Angel” to talk shows with Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, and Larry King. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

David Ritz is the only four-time winner of the Gleason Music Book Award. He has collaborated with Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, B.B. King, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Smokey Robinson, and Don Rickles. He also cowrote, with Gaye, the song “Sexual Healing.”

IN THIS LUMINOUS MEMOIR, LEGENDARY SINGER AND ACTRESS NATALIE COLE TELLS A REMARKABLE STORY OF LIFE-THREATENING ILLNESS AND RECOVERY, AND THE STORY OF A DEATH THAT BROUGHT NEW LIFE.

In 2009 Natalie Cole was on dialysis, her kidneys failing. Without a kidney transplant, her future was uncertain. Throughout Natalie’s illness one of her biggest supporters was her beloved sister Cooke. But then Cooke herself became ill, with cancer. Astonishingly, as Cooke lay dying in a hospital, Natalie received a call that a kidney was available, but the surgery had to be performed immediately. Natalie couldn’t leave her sister’s side—but neither could she refuse the kidney that would save her own life.

This is a story of sisters, Natalie and Cooke, but also of the sisters who made the transplant possible, Patty and Jessica. It was Jessica’s death that gave new life to Natalie, even as Natalie experienced the devastating loss of Cooke. Patty, too, suffered her own terrible loss, but when she met Natalie, she found that her sister’s spirit still lived. Through the gift of life, Natalie and Patty became sisters in spirit.

Love Brought Me Back is a story of loss and recovery, sorrow and joy, success and despair—and, finally, success again. It will touch you as few memoirs ever have.

Publishers Weekly

A second memoir (after Angel on My Shoulder) by singer Cole, daughter of legendary Nat King Cole, proves a stunning, uplifting, however brief story of her sudden diagnosis of hepatitis C and her subsequent need for a kidney transplant. In 2008, Cole, age 60,was told she had a serious liver infection, the result of a virus long dormant that she no doubt contracted 25 years before as an intravenous heroin user. She required weekly injections of interferon, a form of chemotherapy, which rendered her terribly ill and eventually shut down her kidneys. In alternating sections that make little sense at first before converging powerfully with the main story, a 32-year-old Latina woman in L.A. named Jessica suffered pre-eclampsia while pregnant and died in May 2009, her organs donated to an agency that quickly came to Cole's rescue. Successfully fitted with Jessica's kidney, Cole survived. However, there are numerous tragic intersections to this too abrupt narrative: the haunting death of her father in 1965, when he was only 46 and Cole 15; the loss of her brother, Kelly, to AIDS in 1995; and most poignantly, the recent death of her stepsister and kindred spirit, Cooke, during the time that Cole had been handed the means to save her own life. Grief battles with spiritual faith and transcendence in Cole's moving personal story. (Nov.)