The Mother of All Things: A Novel by Alexis Landau (5/7/24)
The Mother of All Things: A Novel by Alexis Landau (5/7/24)
From the author of the WWII novel Those Who Are Saved (“sweeping and lyrical”–People), comes an electrifying page-turner about how female rage, grief, and creativity collide when a woman reconnects with her essential self during a family summer journey.
Kept busy by her life as a wife and mother, art history professor Ava Zaretsky has little time to devote to her research and writing. But while enduring the burden of solo parenting on her husband’s summer film shoot in Bulgaria, she has a chance encounter with her fierce feminist mentor from college, which changes everything.
Ava is swept up into a circle of women who reenact Greco-Roman female rites of initiation, bringing her research to life and illuminating where it intersects with her own story. By exploring the eternal stages of woman-hood across time, The Mother of All Things delivers a revelatory tale of a woman coming to terms with her evolving sense of responsibility to herself and her family, as she achieves a new appreciation of the gifts of female wisdom and self-belief.