A family’s history is woven, unravelled, and rewoven into a tapestry spanning three generations.

Museum curator Matthew Reade’s career and marriage are in crisis in the aftermath of a recent exhibition. When he gets a worrying phone call about his fiercely independent ninety-six-year-old mother, Penelope, Matt uses the excuse of a research project to return to the Maritimes to check on her for himself. Once home, he finds he must stay on to help navigate her new diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.

The more Matt talks to his mother while preparing to move her into the local long-term care home, the more she reveals about his grandmother’s emigration from Norway to New Brunswick before World War I, the murky origins of the family handcraft business, her own complicated past relationships, and Matt’s beginnings. But how much of it can he trust and how much has been rewritten by the disease?

Mark Blagrave was born and raised in Ontario, and has lived in New Brunswick. His first novel, Silver Salts, was shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Novel and the 2009 Margaret and John Savage First Book Award (Atlantic Book Awards). His short stories have been published regularly in leading Canadian literary journals, including The New Quarterly and The Fiddlehead, and his plays have been produced professionally and in university theatres. Formerly a professor at Mount Allison University, Blagrave now lives in London, Ontario, where he is Dean of Arts and Social Sciences at Huron College.

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