Arzamas

A daughter and her ageing mother share a flat, and their exchanges, written mostly as dialogue in the manner of a play, carry the story. The mother's whims, and her refusal to accept the limits of her age and health, make the daughter's care harder and more exasperating, while to the mother the daughter's life has always looked a little suspect as a woman's life. The mother's dementia advances and death draws near. Between the dialogues run short prose fragments, essayistic reflections that follow the life of Emily Dickinson, the narrator's solitary refuge. The book is grounded in the writer's own experience of losing her mother, and it sets love against death.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

206 pages in the original

Genres

Family, Autofiction (assigned by AI)

First published

2016 by Laguna

Author's age

59 when first published

ISBN

9788652121373 (original)

More

Wikidata