Take What You Need

This morning, I read that repeating the name of the deceased can quiet the mind when grieving for complicated people. My stepmother Jean was a complicated person. 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. Set in the Allegheny Mountains of Appalachia, Take What You Need explores the continuing mystery of the people we love most, zeroing in on the joys and difficulties of family with great verve and humour.

Idra Novey is the award-winning author of the novels Ways to Disappear and Those Who Knew. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages and she's written for the Atlantic, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. She teaches at Princeton University and in the MFA Program at New York University.