Natural Elements (eBook)
Natural Elements (eBook)
$13.99
Description
In this moving, layered novel of memory and family, celebrated author Richard Mason tells the story of a mother and daughter, one caught in the past, one racing toward the future.
Joan is eighty years old, a gifted amateur pianist who can no longer play because of her arthritic hands. Joan’s daughter, Eloise, is an ambitious hedge fund manager who has decided to move her mother to an assisted-living facility. As a last hurrah, Eloise plans a trip to Joan’s childhood home in South Africa. What Joan discovers there summons long-buried secrets and opens up an entirely new world. Natural Elements is a dazzling tale of history and longing, and the high-stakes, full-tilt embrace of life.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
About the Author
Richard Mason was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa and in London. The Drowning People was published when he was a student at Oxford. In 1999, Mason started the Kay Mason Foundation, which awards scholarships to students in South Africa. Mason lives in Glasgow, Scotland.
Praise for Natural Elements…
“Impressive. . . a mature, inventive, ambitious novel. . . Mason brings a clear, inviting prose style that resists at every turn the temptation to be showy. To be as young as he is and already have three novels under his belt—the first two were The Drowning People (1999) and Us (2004)—is impressive enough, but to have written novels as good as these is far more so.”
—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
“Ambitious. . . [it] weaves in elements of a corporate thriller and historical fiction flecked with fantasy. . . the South African passages are sublime and the mother-daughter relationship is well done.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Rich in historical background and indelible characters. . . an ambitious and brutally honest view of love, family and aging.”
—Booklist
