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From "one of the finest and bravest novelists at work today," (Vulture) award-winning writer Idra Novey has conjured a novel of "astonishing and singular" honesty (Rumaan Alam) with two determined, unforgettable female voices.
Set in the Allegheny Mountains of Appalachia, Take What You Need traces the parallel lives of Jean and her beloved but estranged stepdaughter, Leah, who's sought a clean break from her rural childhood. In Leah's urban life with her young family, she's revealed little about Jean, how much she misses her stepmother's hard-won insights and joyful lack of inhibition. But with Jean's death, Leah must return to sort through what's been left behind.
What Leah discovers is staggering: Jean has filled her ramshackle house with giant sculptures she's welded from scraps of the area's industrial history. There's also a young man now living in the house who played an unknown role in Jean's last years and in her art.
With great verve and humor, Idra Novey zeros in on the joys and difficulty of family, the ease with which we let distance mute conflict, and the power we can draw from creative pursuits.
Take What You Need explores the continuing mystery of the people we love most with passionate and resonance, this novel illuminating can be built from what others have discarded—art, unexpected friendship, a new contentment of self. This is Idra Novey at her very best.
"Novey explores the mysteries of the creative process, the precariousness of family, and the inherent biases toward unconventional behavior. Novey's richly complex third novel shows not only a nuanced appreciation for the artistic process but also places such creativity within the toxic distrust sewn by poverty, misogyny, and xenophobia." —Booklist (starred review)
"Transforming the odd and the homely into something beautiful is both the subject and the accomplishment of this book." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A novel in the hands of Idra Novey is one sure to startle and subvert readers' expectations… Take What You Need grapples with large-scale xenophobic tensions, as well as the more finely detailed ones among family. Novey has again crafted a bold and uncompromising novel from a clear-eyed point of view." —Shelf Awareness (starred review)
"Idra Novey's Take What You Need is a story about art and passion, about the people and places who forge us. This singular and astonishing novel probes one of the biggest questions of the day: In a moment of cultural and political fracture, how do we live with one another?" —Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind
"Take What You Need is exhilarating, a major novel. I read it in a white heat. Idra Novey writes with ferocious intelligence about the impulse to make beauty in a country coming apart at the seams." —Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You
This information about Take What You Need was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Idra Novey is the award-winning author of the novel Ways to Disappear, winner of the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize, the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Prize, and a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her poetry collections include Exit, Civilian, selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series, The Next Country, a finalist for the 2008 Foreword Book of the Year Award, and Clarice: The Visitor, a collaboration with the artist Erica Baum.
Her work has been translated into ten languages and she's translated numerous authors from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
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