Green Water, Green Sky

An elegant, melancholic novella about memory, family and the meaning of home. This is the tale of the fractured family life of Bonnie McCarthy, a glamorous American divorcée, and her daughter, Flor. Uprooted and unmoored, mother and daughter lead an itinerant existence, with Venice, Cannes and Paris as their backdrop. When Flor attempts to flee this untidy life and the oppressive rule of her eccentric mother, she instead succumbs to a gradual decline into a breakdown. 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.

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.