Provenance
Sue Mell
(Author)
Description
WINNER OF MADVILLE'S FIRST BLUE MOON NOVEL COMPETITION-judged by Clay ReynoldsStill grieving his wife's early death, DJ has spent the last three years-and the money from her insurance policy-collecting guitars, composing music, and continuing to shop the Brooklyn stoop sales and flea markets they'd always enjoyed. When his building is sold, he takes refuge in his younger sister's half-finished basement, imagining a comfortable and solitary retreat in Hurley, the small Hudson Valley town where they grew up. Instead, he finds himself caught up in her troubling divorce, drafted as caregiver for his 11-year-old niece, and unable to face or afford a storage unit crammed with hundreds of vinyl records and every other scrap of his former life. DJ gifts his niece a marbled glass egg, a porkpie hat, and one of his prized guitars. But what's asked of him, on his return to Hurley is not to give the perfect object-it's to give of himself.
Product Details
Price
$19.95
Publisher
Madville Publishing
Publish Date
July 19, 2022
Pages
212
Dimensions
5.5 X 8.5 X 0.48 inches | 0.6 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781956440027
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About the Author
Sue Mell is a writer from Queens, NY. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson, and was a 2020 BookEnds fellow at SUNY Stony Brook. Her collection of micro essays, Giving Care, won the 2021 Chestnut Review Prose Chapbook Prize, and her collection of short stories, A New Day, was a finalist for the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award. Other work has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Hippocampus Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Narrative Magazine and elsewhere. Find her at www.suemellwrites.com
Reviews
If you've ever suffered a loss, if you've ever had to start over, you will find kinship and hope and even joy in Provenance, the story of a widower seeking to salvage his life after moving back to his small hometown in upstate New York. I cannot recall reading a debut novel imbued with such depth of understanding and compassion for its characters, or one that better captures the messy business of living. Sue Mell writes like a dream.-Will Allison, author of What You Have Left and Long Drive Home
.
The story is compelling, and the relationships explored here are a study in the dynamics of family and social expectation. It reminded me in ways of novels such as The Shipping News-studies in mood and situation and character. The prose is gentle, swaying, warm, and inviting. It's just plain beautifully written.-Clay Reynolds, author of Ars Poetica, Monuments, and The Tentmaker.
Provenance is a beautifully supple book about the power of renewal and the everyday, small redemptions hiding within families. Sue Mell artfully captures the hold of the past in all its intoxicating, tumbledown glory and sings it to life in the present.-Dominic Smith, author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos.
This novel taps into the characters' reserves of motivation and strength in service of what we all want: another chance, and what might still be possible when our best efforts fall short.-Amy Hempel, author of The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
