Tea

On a spring day in 1968, eight-year-old Isabel Gold prepares tea for her mother, certain she will drink it and recover from her mysterious sadness. But the tea remains untouched. Not long after, her mother takes her own life. Struggling to understand the ghost her mother left behind, Isabel grows up trying on new identifies. Her yearning for an emotional connection finds her falling in and out of love with various women, but it is not until Isabel learns how to reach deep within herself that she begins to listen to the truths of her own heart.

"Hers is an intimate story, suffused with irony, humor and a close, sensuous attention to physical detail. Isabel's world opens up generously, providing the reader with the intimate truths and emotional complexity that make this impressive debut unforgettable." Publishers Weekly

"An unpretentious, muddle-free first novel." New York Times Book Review

"[a] memorable debut novel...barbed with bitter humor." The New Yorker

"D'Erasmo's prose possesses both the elan of a child playing make-believe and the insights gleaned from a truly literary writer's openness to subtle gradations of emotion and change." Booklist

"I have read a whole lot of contemporary first novels and there's not one I would have characterized as flawless until I read Tea." Newsday

"An intermittently moving debut that tries too hard to be literary. Nonetheless, DErasmo is a writer to watch." Kirkus Reviews

A brilliant novel revealing how Isabel Gold copes first with her mother's suicide, then with her own lesbian identity.

Stacey D'erasmo was a senior editor at the Voice Literary Supplement for seven years. She has written articles for The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, The Nation, Details, and New York Newsday. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and the recipient of the Patty Willrich Fellowship at Stanford University, and she was the first fiction editor for Artforum. She lives in New York.