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Glaciers (Audiobook)

Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith

“Alexis Smith’s brilliant debut novel is filled with kaleidoscopic pleasures. Line by line, in and out of time, this is a haunted, joyful, beautiful book—a true gift.” —Karen Russell

 “Her story could be told in other people’s things. The postcards and the photographs. A garnet ring and a needlepoint of the homestead. The aprons hanging from her kitchen door. Her soft, faded, dog-eared copy of Little House in the Big Woods. A closet full of dresses sewn before she was born. All these things tell a story, but is it hers?”

Sale Date
ISBN
9780385362955
Language
English
Duration
2 hours 36 minutes
Imprint
Tin House
Alexis M. Smith
Isabel is a single, twentysomething thrift-store shopper and collector of remnants, things cast off or left behind by others. Glaciers follows Isabel through a day in her life in which work with damaged books in the basement of a library, unrequited love for the former soldier who fixes her computer, and dreams of the perfect vintage dress move over a backdrop of deteriorating urban architecture and the imminent loss of the glaciers she knew as a young girl in Alaska.

Glaciers unfolds internally, the action shaped by Isabel’s sense of history, memory, and place, recalling the work of writers such as Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Virginia Woolf. For Isabel, the fleeting moments of one day can reveal an entire life. While she contemplates loss and the intricate fissures it creates in our lives, she accumulates the stories—the remnants—of those around her and she begins to tell her own story.
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  • “Lyrical and luminous.”
    Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
  • “An Alaskan childhood and dreams of faraway cities such as Amsterdam inform Alexis M. Smith's Glaciers, a delicate debut novel set in Portland. . . . that reveals in short, memory-soaked postcards of prose a day in the life of twentysomething library worker Isabel.”
    Elle
  • “This novella is a tribute to quiet, meaningful moments: a languid morning, an assessment in a mirror, a chance encounter. Glaciers is unhurried but precise; Glaciers is vast but expertly contained; Glaciers is perfect.”
    Powell's

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