About this item
"Masterful. . . . What a joy to find a book that is both propulsive and perfectly composed." - Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, author of The Nest"Riveting. . . .This is a movingly written, multivoiced novel examining how one tragic circumstance can sow doubt about fundamental things. . . . a transporting vision of community, connection, and forgiveness." - Publishers Weekly (Starred review, Pick of the Week) An award-winning writer makes her debut with this mesmerizing page-turner in the spirit of Everything I Never Told You and Olive Kitteridge.Out for a hike one scorching afternoon in Sycamore, Arizona, a newcomer to town stumbles across what appear to be human remains embedded in the wall of a dry desert ravine. As news of the discovery makes its way around town, Sycamore's longtime residents fear the bones may belong to Jess Winters, the teenage girl who disappeared suddenly some eighteen years earlier, an unsolved mystery that has soaked into the porous rock of the town and haunted it ever since. In the days it takes the authorities to make an identification, the residents rekindle stories, rumors, and recollections both painful and poignant as they revisit Jess's troubled history. In resurrecting the past, the people of Sycamore will find clarity, unexpected possibility, and a way forward for their lives.Skillfully interweaving multiple points of view, Bryn Chancellor knowingly maps the bloodlines of a community and the indelible characters at its heart - most notably Jess Winters, a thoughtful, promising adolescent poised on the threshold of adulthood. Evocative and atmospheric, Sycamore is a coming-of-age story, a mystery, and a moving exploration of the elemental forces that drive human nature - desire, loneliness, grief, love, forgiveness, and hope - as witnessed through the inhabitants of one small Arizona town.
About the Author
Bryn Chancellor is the author of the novel Sycamore (Harper/HarperCollins 2017) , which was a Southwest Book of the Year, an Indie Next and LibraryReads pick, an Amazon Editors' Best Book of 2017, and among Bustle's Best Debuts of 2017. Her story collection When Are You Coming Home? (University of Nebraska Press 2015) won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Brevity, NELLE, Gulf Coast, Blackbird, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, The Common, Publishers Weekly, and elsewhere. A native of California raised in Arizona and transplanted to the South, she is a grateful recipient of fellowships from the Alabama, Arizona, and North Carolina arts councils and the Poets and Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award. A graduate of Vanderbilt University's M.F.A. program, she makes her home in Charlotte, NC, with artist Timothy Winkler and teaches at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
