Glassworks

A gorgeously written and irresistibly intimate queer novel that follows one family across four generations to explore legacy and identity in all its forms.

In 1910, Agnes Carter makes the wrong choice in marriage. After years as an independent woman of fortune, influential with the board of a prominent university because of her financial donations, she is now subject to the whims of an abusive, spendthrift husband. But when Bohemian naturalist and glassblower Ignace Novak reignites Agnes's passion for science, Agnes begins to imagine a different life, and she sets her mind to getting it.

Agnes's desperate actions breed secrecy, and the resulting silence echoes into the future. Her son Edward tries to make his way as a man of faith, but he struggles with all he does not understand about his parents, the meaning of family, and the world at large, while working at a stained-glass studio. In 1986, Edward's child Novak-just Novak-is an acrobatic window washer cleaning Manhattan high-rises, a compulsive caretaker soon caught up in the plight of Cecily, a small-town girl remade as a gender-bending Broadway ingenue. And in 2015, Cecily's daughter Flip-a burned-out stoner trapped in purgatorial cohabitation with her ex-girlfriend and a bureaucratic job firing cremains into keepsake glass ornaments-resolves to break the cycle of inherited secrets, reaching back through the generations in search of a family legacy that feels true.

For readers of Mary Beth Keane, Min Jin Lee, and Rebecca Makkai, Glassworks is an era-spanning, family and chosen-family following, marvel of a debut. (CJ Hauser, author of FAMILY OF ORIGIN)