Holloway
-
- Pre-Order
-
- Expected 5 May 2026
-
- €5.99
Publisher Description
“Elana K. Arnold paints prose like a master. A fascinating journey through time, love, and forgiveness.” – A.S. King, Printz Award-winning author of Dig
Award-winning author Elana K. Arnold returns with a boldly visionary, deeply felt story that crosses space and time to examine loss and love in a world on the brink.
It is the late summer of 2021, and a girl named Nora is on the Paris Metro.
Nora, whose mother loved her, even though Nora was broken.
Nora, who couldn’t help her mother when her mother needed her most.
Nora, from whom the pandemic has taken nearly everything, save the object she clings to: a cylinder containing her mother’s ashes.
With no family left, no friends to speak of, and no way to turn back time, Nora has come to France to keep a promise she never got to make: to spread the ashes in a place her mother never got to see. But instead, Nora finds herself on the run through a forest in the night, taking refuge in a dark holloway. And when she wakes, and tries to make her way back to something she recognizes, she realizes that is impossible.
Because it is no longer 2021.
Questioning everything—including her own sanity—Nora sets out on a journey through a time and place completely foreign to her, and yet one that, much like the time and place she came from, is defined by death, loss, fear, and uncertainty. A journey in which she must find a way to honor her mother—and heal herself—in a world that feels irrevocably broken.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Opening in August 2021, this complex time-travel novel by Arnold (The Blood Years) plumbs an autistic teenager's endeavors to reconstruct her identity following her zealous anti-vaxxer mother's death from Covid. Art has always been a lifeline for 17-year-old Nora, who takes her mother Gillian's remains to Paris to bury them on La Grande Jatte. Disappointed by the park's current setting, Nora sets off to find the perfect spot. While camping solo through the Loire Valley, Nora relives memories of hers and Gillian's years together and revisits her mother's teachings for masking her autistic traits around others. Nora's discovery of a holloway, an ancient sunken path that acts as a portal to 1946, transports her to an asylum at Saint-Alban, where Nora gains a new perspective on her and Gillian's relationship. Arnold successfully renders Nora's sensory and intellectual overload through the protagonist's lyrical reflections on perception, the societal connections between post–Covid pandemic and post-WWII eras, and the making of art as essential and eternal. Posing thought-provoking questions about time, love, and relationships, it's an ambitious and immersive portrait of one neurodivergent teen's experience. Nora and Gillian are white. An author's note concludes. Ages 14–up.