The Mother of All Things
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected May 7, 2024
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- $14.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A daring novel from the acclaimed author of Those Who Are Saved: female rage, grief, and creativity collide in the present and animate the past, when a woman reconnects with her essential self during a summer journey, and discovers an ancient female world that offers parallels to her own
Kept busy by her obligations as a wife and mother, art history professor Ava Zaretsky has little time to devote to her research and writing. Now tagging along on her film-producer husband’s shoot in Bulgaria for the summer, where she’s mostly solo parenting her sweet son and rebellious budding tween daughter, she has a chance encounter with her fierce feminist mentor from college, which changes everything.
Ava is swept up into a circle of women who reenact ancient Greco-Roman mystery rites of initiation, bringing her research to life and illuminating the story of a 5th-century-BC mother-daughter pair whose sense of female loyalty to each other and connection to the divine feminine guides Ava in her exploration of the eternal stages of womanhood. Reaching across time and deep into the female psyche, The Mother of All Things delivers a revelatory tale of a woman coming to terms with her evolving sense of responsibility to herself and her family, as she achieves a new appreciation of the gifts of female wisdom and self-belief.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An art history professor gets initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries in Landau's uneven tale of Greek antiquity and modern-day female rage (following Those Who Are Saved). At 45, Ava Zaretsky is drowning in household chores and has too little time for the book she's writing about a woman's life in 415 BCE Athens. Kasper, her film producer husband, is in Bulgaria filming an action movie, and Ava visits him in Sofia for the summer with their two young children. There, Ava reconnects with Lydia Nikitas, her former mentor at Columbia University. Decades ago, Professor Nikitas destroyed Ava's chance to join Yale's art history graduate program after she chose to write her thesis on a different topic from the one Nikitas advised. Their bond is shaky, to say the least, but Ava confides nonetheless in Nikitas about her struggles, and Nikitas invites her to join a ritual for worshipping Demeter and Persephone in Greece. Landau lays bare the challenges facing a working mother, but the novel's climax, which is teased in a prologue where a group of angry blood-spattered women form a circle around a man and pelt him with stones, isn't quite coherent. Novels like Donna Tartt's The Secret History have tackled similar material to greater effect.
