MotherKind

Description

Jayne Anne Phillips' brilliant new novel explores the spiritual education at the heart of that fundamental transition- the child becoming the caretaker of the parent. In MOTHERKIND, Kate - whose care for her terminally ill mother coincides with the birth of her first child in the early months of a young marriage - must, in a single year, come to terms with radiant beginnings and profound loss. Phillips tells Kate's story in a delicately layered narrative in which the daily details of life resonate with import and meaning.We enter the world of Kate's marriage, of babies and stepchildren, neighbours and friends. We watch as the tumult of Kate's everyday world is enveloped by the gradual vanishing of her mother. And as the woman who has been her best friend and mentor disappears, we see Kate deal with timeless, perhaps unanswerable, questions of love and death.It is the triumph of MOTHERKIND that Kate's complex experience being - and losing - a mother is so luminously portrayed.

Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of five works of fiction. The recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is currently Professor of English and Director of the MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. She divides her time between Boston, New York, and Glen Ridge, New Jersey.

Phillips's writing is distinctive, audacious and powerful * Daily Telegraph * A brilliant writer, utterly original and with an astonishing range -- Ian McEwan Jayne Anne Phillips combines extraordinary perception with extraordinary versatility and power -- Margaret Atwood No number of books read or films seen can deaden one to the intimate act of art by which this wonderful young writer has penetrated the definitive experience of her generation -- Nadine Gordimer Delicate compassion and hard-edged honesty... MotherKind is further proof of an extraordinary ability to reflect the texture of real life * Washington Post Book World *