Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker

DESCRIPTION

“The rare kind of book that lives in your bones” (Ashley Audrain), this novel tells a gripping story of motherhood and motherloss and the brutal, mighty things women do to keep themselves and each other alive, marking Chelsea Bieker as a major fiction talent.

Clove has gone to extremes to keep her past a secret. Thanks to her lies, she’s landed the life of her dreams, complete with a safe husband and two adoring children who will never know the terror that was routine in her own childhood. If her buried anxiety threatens to breach the surface, Clove (if that is really her name) focuses on finding the right supplement, the right gratitude meditation. 

But when she receives a letter from a women’s prison in California, her past comes screeching into the present, entangling her in a dangerous game with memory and the people she thought she had outrun. As we race between her precarious present-day life in Portland, Oregon and her childhood in a Waikiki high-rise with her mother and father, Clove is forced to finally unravel the defining day of her life. How did she survive that day, and what will it take to end the cycle of violence? Will the truth undo her, or could it ultimately save her?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHELSEA BIEKER is the author of the debut novel Godshot, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize and named a Barnes & Noble Pick of the Month. Her story collection, Heartbroke, won the California Book Award and was a New York Times Best California Book of 2022. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award as well as residencies at McDowell and Tin House. Raised in Hawai'i and California, Birker now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children.

PRAISE

“MADWOMAN is brilliant. The rare kind of book that lives in your bones, as riveting as it is intimate. This is emotional suspense at its best, but it's also a chronicle of modern womanhood, an exploration of what mothers and daughters do to and for each other, and an ode to hope in the aftermath of trauma. Somehow, Bieker delivers all of this in a voice that is fresh, urgent, and darkly comic. A novel hasn't consumed me like this in a very long time. MADWOMAN is on my list of all-time favorites.” — Ashley Audrain, author of The Push and The Whispers

“Unputdownable. Harrowing while somehow also being deeply funny and furiously wise. Chelsea Bieker is a daredevil and a wonder.” — Claudia Dey, author of Daughter

DETAILS

Hardcover | 336 pages