Almanac Branch

by Bradford Morrow

Overview

A brilliant allegory that traces the life of a young woman whose sanity teeters on the edge as she tries to hold together her troubled family.
Since childhood, Grace Brush has suffered episodic migraines. With them come hallucinatory visions, which reveal buried memories, leading her inexorably on the path to discovering secrets that could send her family’s business empire into ruin. As Grace grows into adulthood, her quest for personal freedom collides with the mysteries of her past, making of her story an almanac of the perplexing nature of truth itself. Bradford Morrow maps the geography of a family’s tragedy and one woman’s redemption with astounding psychological insight, grace, and nuance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781451672442
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	10/03/2011
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Bradford Morrow is a rare book dealer who got started in the business in Santa Barbara, California. Shortly after, he relocated to New York City to work at the literary journal Conjunctions, which he founded with the poet Kenneth Rexroth. He has two cats and divides his time between the City and upstate New York.

What People are Saying About This

Joy Williams

Rich and risky...rich in its remarkable prose, its stories within stories, risky in its intentions, which is to render and mirror consciousness.

John Hawkes

The Almanac Branch...is an uncanny tale, lyrical and hallucinatory by turns, perverse and innocent, something of a latter-day Gothic romance by one of our best new writers.

Editorial Reviews

Morrow's hybrid tale of Freudian psychology and gothic effects is narrated by Grace Brush, a 33-year-old woman traumatized by a childhood marked by migraines and incest. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The interplay between truth and fancy is the focus of Morrow's intriguing, multilayered psychological study. Grace Brush suffers from megrims in both senses of the word--the acute physical pain of the migraine and the psychic pain of random, furtive, unbidden thoughts and feelings that impose themselves upon her. In her migrainous state, the realities of her life take on new dimensions. Thus, an episode of childhood sexual experimentation with a younger brother takes on, after his death, the characteristics of incestuous ravishment. This memory, in turn, influences her response to both husband and lover. It is only one of many branches in this complex tale of a family's struggle to find redemption. Grace may be the most obvious victim, but others suffer too--from the wheeler-dealer father who loves but avoids his children to the older brother whose own fantasies about his sister take concrete form in a pornographic movie. This second novel (following Come Sunday, LJ 4/1/88) is an accomplished work worthy of addition to most collections of serious fiction.-- David Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Peters burg, Fla.

Library Journal