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The cover of Etched in Sand. (Credit: courtesy photo)

A memoir published last summer by New Suffolk attorney Regina Calcaterra is climbing The New York Times’s best-seller list

“Etched in Sand” returned to the Times’s best-sellers list for non-fiction e-books at No. 20 last week, but is expected to climb to No. 12 when the list is next updated, Calcaterra said. That would match its previous top spot.

Calcaterra said her publisher told her she’d never had a book reappear after falling off the prestigious list.

“The message is so powerful,” Calcaterra said when asked this week why she believes the book has become so popular.  “It just transcends ethnicities and demographics and different social statuses.”

Released last August by a division of HarperCollins, the book deals with Calcaterra’s difficult childhood growing up in foster homes and under the care of an abusive mother. She’d grow up to be an attorney, a one-time state senate candidate, chief of staff to Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone and the executive director of a state commission investigating public corruption.

Now she’s a best-selling author, too.

Calcaterra said the book has been very popular among students when incorporated into school curriculums. She has also been asked to speak at many schools across the county, including Greenport High School.

“People read it and realize they can make a difference with what they do,” she said. “It is resonating with different populations.”

We sat down with her for an interview the day the book was released. She was also featured in a piece about human resiliency on CBS Sunday Morning in October.

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