Wait: A Novel by Gabriella Burnham (5/21/24)

A young woman reunites with her teenage sister in their childhood home on Nantucket Island after their mother disappears—an alluring coming-of-age novel from the acclaimed author of It Is Wood, It Is Stone.

“Wait simultaneously illuminates the precariousness of young womanhood and existing as an immigrant in the U.S., while showing the resourcefulness and strength needed to survive. Strength derived not from the individual alone, but from their ties to their community: their sisters, mothers, friends, and neighbors. Reading this novel, I could almost feel the Nantucket sea breeze whipping against my face.” —Daphne Palasi Andreades, author of Brown Girls

Elise is out dancing the night before her college graduation, when her younger sister Sophie calls to tell her their mom is nowhere to be found. Elise leaves on the next flight back to her childhood home, Nantucket Island, for the first time in nearly four years. When she arrives, she discovers the ways in which her whip-smart little sister has had to make do without her.

The sisters soon learn that their mother was stopped by police on her way home from work and deported to São Paulo, Brazil. Intent on bringing her mother back, Elise stays and secures the same job she had in high school: monitoring endangered birds that have laid eggs on a remote beach. Meanwhile, her best friend from college, Sheba—a gregarious socialite and heir to a famed children's toy company—reveals that she has inherited her grandfather’s summer mansion on Nantucket. What will Elise do when the new life she created in college collides with the life she left behind on the island? As Elise confronts the emotional and material realities that have fractured her family, she is confronted by a world in Brazil that her mother has had to leave behind, too.

Told with penetrating insight, humor, and unexpected tenderness, Wait is a story about an immigrant family swimming against the social currents that erode bonds: housing precarity, immigration systems, and inherited wealth. But it is also a story about love, wit, and sisterhood, and how Elise and Sophie cling to their relationship in the midst of cataclysmic change, all the while dreaming about a better future.