Isabel is a single, twentysomething thrift-store shopper and collector of remnants, things cast off or left behind by others. Glaciers follows Isabel through a day in her life in which work with damaged books in the basement of a library, unrequited love for the former soldier who fixes her computer, and dreams of the perfect vintage dress move over a backdrop of deteriorating urban architecture and the imminent loss of the glaciers she knew as a young girl in Alaska.
Glaciers unfolds internally, the action shaped by Isabel's sense of history, memory, and place, recalling the work of writers such as Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Virginia Woolf. For Isabel, the fleeting moments of one day can reveal an entire life. While she contemplates loss and the intricate fissures it creates in our lives, she accumulates the stories--the remnants--of those around her and she begins to tell her own story.
Read the first chapter courtesy of Poets&Writers.
Jackie says:
"This is a very interesting debut novel told in short vignettes. The main character is a twenty-something woman whose life story is played out in a single day for the reader through her memories, her encounters, what she observes, what she wishes. It is a quiet story told with great understatement and a fluid way with words, but with astonishingly deep meaning floating in the gentle episodes. It's difficult to describe, but a pleasure to read. Give it a chance."
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