"Zhenia is adrift in Los Angeles, pregnant with a baby her husband doesn't want, while her Russian grandmother and favorite person in the world is dying on the opposite coast. She's deeply disconnected from herself and her desires when she gets a strange call from Paul, a psychic medium who usually specializes in channeling dead pets, with a message from the other side. Zhenia's great-grandmother Irina, a Russian Revolutionary, has approached him...

"In her first novel for over a decade, Claire Kilroy takes readers deep into the early days of motherhood. Exploring the clash of fierce love for a new life with a seismic change in identity, Kilroy vividly explores the raw, tumultuous emotions of a new mother, as the narrator, Soldier's, marriage strains and she struggles with questions of equality, autonomy and creativity"--

"A clever and propulsive debut novel tracing the complicated relationship between a larger-than-life actress who refuses to abandon her career for motherhood, and the daughter she chooses to abandon instead, as they confront one another once and for all"--

"Tuck is slow to understand the circumstances that have driven her family to an uninhabited island off the coast of Maine, the former home of her deceased grandmother where she once spent her childhood summers. Squatting there now, she must care for her spirited young daughter and scrape together enough money to leave before winter arrives--or before they are found out. Relying on the island for sustenance and answers--bladderwrack, rosehips, tenacious...