A young woman reunites with her teenage sister in their childhood home on Nantucket Island after their mother disappears-an alluring coming-of-age novel from the acclaimed author of It Is Wood, It Is Stone.
"Wait simultaneously illuminates the precariousness of young womanhood and existing as an immigrant in the U.S., while showing the resourcefulness and strength needed to survive. Strength derived not from the individual alone, but from their ties to their community- their sisters, mothers, friends, and neighbors. Reading this novel, I could almost feel the Nantucket sea breeze whipping against my face." -Daphne Palasi Andreades, author of Brown Girls
A young woman reunites with her teenage sister in their childhood home on Nantucket Island after their mother is deported in this alluring coming-of-age novel that "movingly tackles serious issues in one of America's premier vacation spots" (NPR).
"Gabriella Burnham knows . . . the Nantucket of undocumented immigrants and broken families. . . . This tender novel allows us to rejoice when tiny windows of opportunities begin to open."-Imbolo Mbue, The New York Times Book Review
A VULTURE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Elise is out dancing the night before her college graduation when her younger sister, Sophie, calls to tell her that their mom is nowhere to be found. Elise leaves on the next flight back to her childhood home, Nantucket Island, for the first time in nearly four years.
The sisters soon learn that their mother was stopped by police on her way home from work and deported to S o Paulo, Brazil. Intent on bringing her mother back, Elise stays and secures the same job she had in high school- monitoring endangered birds. Meanwhile, her best friend from college, Sheba-a gregarious socialite and heir to a famed children's toy company-reveals that she has inherited her grandfather's summer mansion on Nantucket. Elise's worlds collide as she confronts the emotional and material conditions that have fractured her family, as well as the life in Brazil that her mother has had to leave behind.
Told with penetrating insight, humor, and unexpected tenderness, Wait is a story about a family swimming against the social currents that erode bonds- housing precarity, immigration systems, and inherited wealth. But it is also a story about love, wit, and sisterhood, and how two sisters cling to each other in the midst of cataclysmic change, all the while dreaming about a better future.
