Literary Fiction
The Salt Archive
Elena Marlowe2024
Literary Fiction
The Salt Archive
A cartographer returns to map the island that erased her family — and finds the record has been rewritten.
2024 All books
Literary Fiction
The Weight of Quiet Things
Elena Marlowe2020
Literary Fiction · 2020
The Weight of Quiet Things
A house clearance forces three sisters to price everything their mother refused to explain.
- Published
- 2020
- Genre
- Literary Fiction
- Pages
- 314
- Publisher
- Harrowgate Press
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About the book
The Aldrich sisters have four days to empty the family house before completion. What they find is not a secret so much as an accumulation: forty years of receipts, a locked box of unsent letters, a spare-room wardrobe of clothes in a size none of them ever wore. As the skip fills, so does the ledger of old grievances, and the sisters begin bartering over objects that are really arguments. Winner of the Ellery Prize for Fiction, this is a novel about the terrible arithmetic of inheritance — and about how a family's love is often stored in exactly the places nobody wants to look.
From Part Two
By the third day they had developed a system, which is to say they had stopped speaking except in categories. Keep. Skip. Charity. Decide later. The last pile grew so large that Nell moved it into the front room, and then into the front room and the hall, and then it stopped being a pile and became simply the house.
Their mother had kept every card any of them had ever made her. Forty years of folded sugar paper, glitter gone dull, the handwriting climbing slowly out of childhood. Rosalind put the whole box in Skip and stood there, and did not move, and eventually Nell came and took it out again without either of them saying anything about it at all.
The Weight of Quiet Things · Elena Marlowe
Praise for The Weight of Quiet Things
“The Ellery jury called it 'a flawless act of narrative restraint'. For once, a prize citation undersold the book.”
“Marlowe understands that families argue about furniture because the other subject is unbearable.”