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.