Book details

Book description

The astonishing Orange Prize-shortlisted debut from the author of 'Flying Leap' and 'Nice Big American Baby'.

This is a truly strange and striking tale that begins in the deep, and deeply magical, European forest, in the world depicted in Chagall's paintings and Grimms' Fairy Tales, and proceeds to tell the story of four generations of women from one fated family.

Budnitz builds her book with wit and art somewhere in the gaps between magic realism, family saga and female bildungsroman. She marries great technical skill to quirky humour and dizzying metaphor. She has an uncanny knack for the destabilizing and indelible image, but does not abandon sense for sensibility. She is always readable, albeit strangely so. She might yet be an Americanized heir to the throne left vacant by Angela Carter. 'Judy Budnitz's first novel is no ordinary coming-to-America story. The familiar journey from Old World to New becomes magical in her hands. You're left with the delicious thrill of having been duped - or have you? - by a master of embellishment.' New York Times Book Review

'A startlingly imaginative first novel.' San Francisco Chronicle Judy Budnitz was born in 1973 and grew up in Atlanta. She graduated from Harvard in 1995 and received an MFA in creative writing from NYU in 1998. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, Story, and Glimmer Train, amongst other venues.