The farthest place you can go is closer than you can imagine.Rose is a sensible woman, thirty-four years old. Together with her widowed mother, Fiona, she runs a small repertory cinema in a big city. Fiona is in the early stages of dementia and is beginning to make painful references to Rose’s sister, Ava, who died young in an accident.It is high summer, and a band of storms, unusual for their frequency and heavy downpour, is rolling across the city. Someth...

"A brilliantly inspired melding of research into the lives of African elephants and the creation of a distinctly original . . . alternative world." —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of BooksIn The White Bone, a novel imagined entirely from the perspective of African elephants, Barbara Gowdy creates a world whole and separate that illuminates our own.For years, young Mud and her family have roamed the high grasses, swamps, and deserts o...

From the author of The White Bone, a piercing novel of passionate attachment and of the fear and freedom of letting goLouise Kirk learns about love and loss at an early age. When she is nine years old, her former beauty queen mother disappears, leaving a note that reads only—and incorrectly—"Louise knows how to work the washing machine." Soon after, the Richters and their adopted son, Abel, move in across the street. Louise's immediate devotion to the exoti...