Geographies of the Heart
Sarah Macmillan always puts family first, but she can't quite stretch her arms wide enough to hold on to everyone as they all age: her career-minded, inattentive younger sister, Glennie; their grandparents, who are slowly fading; or a pregnancy Sarah desperately wanted. But it's her tumultuous relationship with Glennie that makes Sarah feel the loneliest. She'd always believed that their relationship was foundational, even unbreakable. Though blessed with a happy marriage to Al, whose compassion and humor she admires, Sarah shoulders both caregiving and loss largely alone and grows bitter about Glennie's absences, until one decision forces them all to decide what family means-and who is family. Narrated by the chorus of their three voices, this elegantly told and deeply moving novel examines the pull of tradition, the power of legacies, the importance of forgiveness, and the fertile but fragile ground that is family, the first geography to shape our hearts.
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"...tender...[a] mature depiction of love and sisterhood...Geographies of the Heart is a piercing novel populated by absorbing legacies and instances of forgiveness"-Foreword Reviews
"...Summie writes with admirable nuance." -Publishers Weekly"An accomplished, confident debut, with complex characters you'll be rooting for."-J. Ryan Stradal, bestselling author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest and The Lager Queen of Minnesota
"Caitlin Hamilton Summie writes like waves cross large oceans. Words, sentences, chapters and stories build with a complexity of wind, current, and underground tectonic force until they crash toward their resolution onshore. Her debut novel, Geographies of the Heart, is a new force of nature that readers of Summie's work will love. Intense, searching, intimate in the moment and sweeping in its range, this novel is an oceans-wide meditation on the inseparability of family, and the redemption of loss."-Andrew Krivak, author of The Bear "Geographies of the Heart is both riveting and moving, its characters rendered with painstaking and loving attention. I got to know them very well, and the author made me care about them. Caitlin Hamilton Summie is not afraid to go deep, to explore the fears and emotions most of us spend so much time trying to conceal. I loved this novel. I only wish there were more like it."-Steve Yarbrough, author of The Unmade World "Years of secrets, resentments, and words left unspoken force a family to examine the fragile complexities of the heart. A tender yet powerful journey, where bitterness gives way to the determination it takes to stitch lives back together."-Beth Hoffman, New York Times bestselling author of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt
