GIANT MOTHER

A surreal and dizzying journey through memory and grief

In the wake of her mother's sudden death, a young, newly sober woman travels to Tbilisi, Georgia--a city suspended between past and present, empire and independence, superstition and modernity--to investigate the region's intensely public mourning rituals.

There, she meets Sasha, a charismatic expat journalist from Russia who becomes her companion and guide through a disorienting labyrinth of decaying buildings filled with doppelgangers, silk moths, and an aluminum giant--the Mother of Georgia--who watches enigmatically over the city. Haunted by her memories, and longing for release, she wanders Tbilisi's wine-filled streets, desperately searching for an alternative to the stifled, private mourning she experienced at home.

Lyrical, hallucinatory, and achingly precise, Giant Mother is a novel of grief rendered strange and luminous that takes its reader to a place where memory, myth, and desire collide in a startling reckoning with loss.