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Notable
- Finalist, Pen Winship Award
- Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Book
- Selection of the Quality Paperback Book Club
Unravelling
This rich, evocative novel, set in 19th-century New England, follows the fortunes and misfortunes of a young, headstrong woman, Aimee Slater. Aimee has always dreamed of a life beyond the small farm her family owns. When she sets out to seek her fortune at the Lowell Textile Mills, she opens a rift between herself and her mother that feels, in her own words, like “an impossible distance.” How Aimee bridges that vast gulf is beautifully told in this acclaimed and moving story of love and loss.
Praise
“A pleasure, quiet and increasingly gripping. In images as simple and specific as that of Aimee’s blind rabbit sniffing its salt lick, Graver endows the habits of coping with a profound dignity.”
—The New Yorker
“Her accomplishment remains exceptional… Unravelling creates a home-on-the-margins beyond cant—a kind of exiles’ utopia, intensely imagined, right valued, memorable.”
—Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review
“Like Margaret Atwood in Alias Grace, Elizabeth Graver examines what happens when a nineteenth-century woman defies the conventions of her place and time… This tender, thoughtful novel pays tribute to the way a woman can ultimately patch together her crazy quilt of independence and fulfillment.”
—Glamour
“This beautiful novel captures the bittersweet relationship between mothers and daughters, where what is not said is just as important as what is.”
—Seventeen