Edan Lepucki

Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize From New York Times bestselling author Edan Lepucki comes an enthralling saga about family secrets that grow more powerful with time, set against the magical, dangerous landscape of California Ursa possesses a very special gift. She can travel through memory and revisit her past. After she flees her hometown for the counterculture glory of 1950’s California, the intoxicating potential of her unique ability eventually draws a group of women into her orbit and into a ramshackle Victorian mansion in the woods outside Santa Cruz. Yet Ursa’s powers come with a cost. Soon this cultish community of sisterhood takes an ominous turn, prompting her son, Ray, and his pregnant lover, Cherry, to flee their home for Los Angeles and reinvent themselves far from Ursa’s insidious influence. But escaping their past won’t be so easy. A series of mysterious events forces Cherry to abandon their baby, leaving Ray to raise Opal alone. Now a teenager and still heartbroken over the abandonment of the mother she never knew, Opal must journey into her own past to reveal the generations of secrets that gave rise to the shimmering source of her family's painful legacy. From the forests of Santa Cruz, to the 1980s glam of Melrose Avenue to a solitary mansion among the oil derricks off La Cienega Boulevard, and brimming with the double-edged capacity of memory to both heal and harm, Time’s Mouth is a poignant and evocative excavation of the bonds that bind families together.

A Novel

Time's Mouth

Katheryn

A child required something beyond mere presence and attention. What Opal needed was more complicated than a clean diaper or a lullaby. Her needs went deeper, unfathomably deeper, because that's what a child was: a vast network of unending and connected needs. A child needed to take you for granted. They needed you to be there in the middle of the night when they heard a sound you couldn't explain. They needed you to tell them Everything's going to ne okay. They needed you to understand the world and translate it for them. 

Fab repeating a rumor that is apparently about every high school in So Cal, including the ones I went to

You know its architect designed prisons, right?

Isla Patricia was what Opal and Fab called an "SPD"- small dose person. Other people, they argued, you could hang out with forever. They had a name for those types too: "Frasts." Fab had told him, her voice soft and quavery, as if overcome by her own profundity. "One person's SPD is someone else's "Feast." Opql nodded along, adding, "It's all about how hungry you are "

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