Dark Mother

In this luminous, restless debut, Waldo Frank follows David Markand out of a suffocating small town and into the throttling pulse of 1920s New York. The death of his mother has cleaved his life in two: before and after. Armed with her memory and haunted by what he couldn't save, David descends into a city that promises everything and delivers only hunger. Frank writes with startling sensory precision about the way cities feel to young idealists, the particular cruelty of wanting to matter, and the silence between generations that no one teaches you to fill. This is a novel about the first great loss, not of a person, but of the person you were before you learned how to survive. For anyone who has ever fled home and wondered if running was courage or cowardice.