Someone Not Really Her Mother

This masterful and compassionate novel is split in to a series of interlinked stories that tell the tale of Hannah Pearl. As Hannah’s memory of the present begins to fade, she increasingly inhabits the world of her ardent and frightened youth in war-torn France and England, while her memories of life in America with her daughter and granddaughters have almost been erased. Throughout the book each character must negotiate the fraught intricacies of memory, geography, and motherhood. The reader will discover and illuminate, with miraculous effect, all the pieces of this intelligent and dream-like puzzle.

Harriet Scott Chessman is a teacher and a librettist. Her fiction has been translated into ten languages, and has been featured in publications such as The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle.  She is the author of The Beauty of Ordinary Things, Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, and Ohio Angels. She lives in Bradford, Connecticut.