Series: Norton Paperback Fiction | Publication Date: October 1, 1992
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. Among the many branches in this provocative novel are the limb of a tree outside Grace’s window where the ghost of her dead brother, Desmond, lives, and the corrupt branch of a dummy corporation at the heart of her father’s vast conglomerate. 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.
In The Almanac Branch, Bradford Morrow maps the geography of a family’s tragedy and one woman’s redemption with astounding psychological insight, grace, and nuance.
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.
Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
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. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Bradford Morrow has lived for the past thirty years in New York City and rural upstate New York, though he grew up in Colorado and lived and worked in a variety of places in between. While in his mid-teens, he traveled through rural Honduras as a member of the Amigos de las Americas program, serving as a medical volunteer in the summer of 1967. The following year he was awarded an American Field Service scholarship to finish his last year of high school as a foreign exchange student at a Liceo Scientifico in Cuneo, Italy. In 1973, he took time off from studying at the University of Colorado to live in Paris for a year. After doing graduate work on a Danforth Fellowship at Yale University, he moved to Santa Barbara, California, where he worked as a bookseller until relocating to New York City in 1981, where he began editing the literary journal "Conjunctions" and writing novels.
His first five novels--"Come Sunday" (1988), "The Almanac Branch" (1992, PEN/Faulkner Award finalist), "Trinity Fields" (Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, 1995), "Giovanni's Gift" (1997) and "Ariel's Crossing" (2002)--are all available as e-books from Open Road Media from January 25, 2011.
In collaboration with eighteen artists, Morrow is the author of "A Bestiary," as well as a book for children, "Didn't Didn't Do It," illustrated by the legendary Gahan Wilson. Morrow has also edited and written a number of other books, including "Posthumes" (poetry), "The New Gothic" (with Patrick McGrath) and "The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth" (with Sam Hamill) and has contributed to many anthologies and journals. As founding editor of "Conjunctions," he has edited over 55 volumes of the journal from 1981 to the present. An anthology on death, "The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death," co-edited with David Shields, will be published by W.W. Norton in February 2011.
His new novel, "The Diviner's Tale," is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the U.S. and in England with Corvus (Atlantic), as well as an audiobook with Blackstone. His first collection of short stories, "Lush," will be published in Fall 2011 by Pegasus Books. He is completing work on his seventh novel, "The Prague Sonata," as well as a book of creative nonfiction works, "Meditations on a Shadow."
Morrow's many awards include an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes, as well as the PEN/Nora Magid Award. He has taught at Princeton, Columbia, and Brown Universities and for the past twenty years has been a Bard Center Fellow and professor of literature at Bard College.
This review is from: The Almanac Branch (Norton Paperback Fiction) (Paperback)
This books was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner award in 1991 and as I read it I was amazed I had never heard of it before. It tells the story of Grace Brush, a girl trying to stay sane in a world of migraines, halucinations, and famliy secrets. The language is lush and carefully conceived, inviting the reader into the mind of a young child as recalled by a smart and generous adult. This is not easy going - the story is heart-breaking - but it is well worth the time.
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