Green Water, Green Sky

(Paperback)

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With a foreword by Brandon Taylor.

An elegant, melancholic novella about memory, family and the meaning of home.

This is the tale of the fractured family life of Bonnie McCarthy, an American divorce, and her daughter, Flor. Uprooted and unmoored, mother and daughter lead an itinerant existence - Venice, Canne and Paris as a backdrop - glamorous and dependent. When Flor attempts to flee this untidy life and the oppressive rule of her eccentric mother, she instead succumbs to a gradual decline into insanity.

Green Water, Green Sky was Mavis Gallant's debut novel and is a quietly dazzling example of her masterful shifts in narrative perspective and her visceral exploration of displacement and exile.

'A very intense piece of writing, very dark, but light and absurd at the same time . . . [Gallant's] body of work is unique and profound; I don't think there will be another quite like her.' Jhumpa Lahiri

Reviews

'One of the great short-story writers of our time.' Michael Ondaatje


'Shrewd, wonderful . . . [Gallant] was always a truth teller, in her life and in her work.' --Paul Bailey

'Brief, intense and technically dazzling.' --Lisa Allardice

'A very intense piece of writing, very dark, but light and absurd at the same time . . . [Gallant's] body of work is unique and profound; I don't think there will be another quite like her.' --Jhumpa Lahiri

Author Bio

Mavis Gallant was born in Montreal in 1922. In the early 1940s, she briefly worked for the National Film Board before becoming a reporter. She married a musician, John Gallant, but they were divorced before the end of the decade. Gallant moved to Paris and, apart from fleeting spells in London, Spain and back in Canada, lived there for the rest of her life - although she never renounced her Canadian citizenship. From 1951, the New Yorker published more than one hundred of her stories. Her body of prize-winning work includes a dozen collections of stories, two novels, a play and numerous essays and reviews. Green Water, Green Sky was her debut novel. She died in 2014.