April: “Take What You Need” by Idra Novey
Take What You Need by Idra Novey
Our April 2023 Book of the Month
ABOUT THE BOOK
Set in the Allegheny Mountains of Appalachia, Take What You Need traces the parallel lives of Jean and her beloved but estranged stepdaughter, Leah, who’s sought a clean break from her rural childhood. In Leah’s urban life with her young family, she’s revealed little about Jean, how much she misses her stepmother’s hard-won insights and joyful lack of inhibition. But with Jean’s death, Leah must return to sort through what’s been left behind.
What Leah discovers is staggering: Jean has filled her ramshackle house with giant sculptures she’s welded from scraps of the area’s industrial history. There’s also a young man now living in the house who played an unknown role in Jean’s last years and in her art.
With great verve and humor, Idra Novey zeros in on the joys and difficulty of family, the ease with which we let distance mute conflict, and the power we can draw from creative pursuits.
Take What You Need explores the continuing mystery of the people we love most with passionate and resonance, this novel illuminating can be built from what others have discarded—art, unexpected friendship, a new contentment of self. This is Idra Novey at her very best.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Idra Novey is the author of Those Who Knew, an Indie Next Pick and Amazon Best Book of the Month, and Ways to Disappear, winner of the Sami Rohr Prize, the Brooklyn Library Prize for Fiction, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into ten languages and she’s written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and New York Magazine. She’s translated the work of several prominent Brazilian writers, most recently Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H.
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