Mother of God

Marlene calls herself a psychic wound healer, but really, her paranormal abilities are restricted to visions.

In fact, they're restricted to visions of just one person.

Her mother, Darlene.

The visions started when Marlene was nine: a symbol and a symptom of an unfathomably deep maternal connection; a mental and emotional escape hatch; evidence of a bond so intense that a rupture was perhaps inevitable.

And yet, years of estrangement later, when Marlene receives a message from Darlene asking her to come home, she packs up her life in Vancouver and drives across the country to small-town Nova Scotia. It's a trip fraught with vivid, oppressive memories--of childhood betrayals, the distant decades that followed, and the malevolent presence of Darlene's on-again-off-again boyfriend, Ed. Still, the opportunity is overwhelming--the chance to become the centres of each other's universes once again.

But when she arrives, Darlene is not where she should be.

Figures from the past materialize as reality's thin membrane begins to give way, and Marlene is forced to confront the incomprehensible as she is sent down a path of terrors, to the very end of human feeling, to the very end of her mind.

Sinister and surreal, ghastly and full of grace, Mother of God is a monumental step forward from one of the great writers of her generation.