“Endlessly powerful. . . . Here is one you should not miss, a gratifying feast in lush, lyrical, and full-throated form.”—NPR.org
Lulu can't sing. Since the traumatic birth of her daughter, the internationally renowned soprano hasn't dared utter a note. She's afraid that her body is too fragile and that she may have lost her talent to a long-dreaded curse afflicting all of the mothers in her family.
When Lulu was a child, her strong-willed grandmother Ada filled her head with fables of the family's enchanted history in the Polish countryside. A fantastical lore took hold—an incantatory mix of young love, desperate hope, and one sinister bargain that altered the family's history forever. Since that fateful pact, Ada tells Lulu, each mother in their family has been given a daughter, but each daughter has exacted an essential cost from her mother.
Ada was the first to recognize young Lulu's transcendent talent, spotting it early on in their cramped Chicago apartment, then watching her granddaughter ascend to dizzying heights in packed international concert halls. But as the curse predicted, Lulu's mother, a sultry and elusive jazz singer, disappeared into her bitterness in the face of Lulu's superior talent—before disappearing from her family's life altogether. Now, in the early days of her own daughter's life, Lulu now finds herself weighing her overwhelming love for her child against the burden of her family's past.
In incandescent prose, debut novelist Adrienne Celt skillfully intertwines the sensuous but precise physicality of both motherhood and music. She infuses The Daughters with the spirit of the rusalka, a bewitching figure of Polish mythology that inspired Dvorák's classic opera. The result is a tapestry of secrets, affairs, and unimaginable sacrifices, revealing a family legacy laced with brilliance, tragedy, and most mysterious and seductive of all—the resonant ancestral lore that binds each mother to the one that came before.
“Endlessly powerful. . . . Here is one you should not miss, a gratifying feast in lush, lyrical, and full-throated form.”—NPR.org
Lulu can't sing. Since the traumatic birth of her daughter, the internationally renowned soprano hasn't dared utter a note. She's afraid that her body is too fragile and that she may have lost her talent to a long-dreaded curse afflicting all of the mothers in her family.
When Lulu was a child, her strong-willed grandmother Ada filled her head with fables of the family's enchanted history in the Polish countryside. A fantastical lore took hold—an incantatory mix of young love, desperate hope, and one sinister bargain that altered the family's history forever. Since that fateful pact, Ada tells Lulu, each mother in their family has been given a daughter, but each daughter has exacted an essential cost from her mother.
Ada was the first to recognize young Lulu's transcendent talent, spotting it early on in their cramped Chicago apartment, then watching her granddaughter ascend to dizzying heights in packed international concert halls. But as the curse predicted, Lulu's mother, a sultry and elusive jazz singer, disappeared into her bitterness in the face of Lulu's superior talent—before disappearing from her family's life altogether. Now, in the early days of her own daughter's life, Lulu now finds herself weighing her overwhelming love for her child against the burden of her family's past.
In incandescent prose, debut novelist Adrienne Celt skillfully intertwines the sensuous but precise physicality of both motherhood and music. She infuses The Daughters with the spirit of the rusalka, a bewitching figure of Polish mythology that inspired Dvorák's classic opera. The result is a tapestry of secrets, affairs, and unimaginable sacrifices, revealing a family legacy laced with brilliance, tragedy, and most mysterious and seductive of all—the resonant ancestral lore that binds each mother to the one that came before.
The Daughters: A Novel
256
The Daughters: A Novel
256eBook
Related collections and offers
Customer Reviews
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781631490460 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Liveright Publishing Corporation |
| Publication date: | 07/27/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 238,856 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Customer Reviews
Explore More Items
From the bestselling author of Mary: Mrs. A. Lincoln, a magical novel about the surprising acts we are capable of in the name of love.
Set in
The second novel by the Man Booker Prize shortlisted author Madeleine Thien is "beautiful, deeply moving, [and] addresses universal questions" (Independent).
Set in Cambodia during the regime of
The profoundly different choices of a mother and her daughter infuse this rich, expansive novel with both intimate detail and wide resonance
When Joyce Stevenson is thirteen, her family moves to
From the author of Apple Tree Yard, a masterful thriller about espionage, love, and redemption
John Harper is in hiding in a remote hut on a tropical island. As he lies awake at night, listening to
Two friends, one a budding writer home from Europe, the other an ambitious racketeer, meet in the only nightclub, the Tram 83, in a war-torn city-state in secession, surrounded by profit-seekers of
A new edition of one of bestselling author Lionel Shriver’s early novels, reissued 25 years after first publication—an engrossing commentary on the intersection of politics and human
"I can’t remember the last time I read a book I wish so much I’d written. Treeborne is beautiful, and mythic in ways I would never have been able to imagine...I can’t say enough
A new high point for a master novelist, an emotionally charged reckoning with art, marriage, and the past
Kevin Pace is working on a painting that he won’t allow anyone to see: not his children;
A psychologically twisting novel about a politically-charged act of violence that echoes through a small Spanish town; a dazzling debut in the tradition of Daniel Alarcón and Mohsin Hamid
It's
Laura Thornby
A bittersweet, biting, sharply observed family drama from the author of Waterloo
After her father has a heart attack and subsequent surgery, Helen Atherton returns to her hometown of Washington, D.C.,
