Daughters: A Novel

Summary

A HILARIOUS, MOVING STORY OF TWO SISTERS WHO EMBARK ON A ROAD TRIP TO PROTECT THE LEGACY OF THEIR ARTIST MOTHER, GRAPPLING WITH PAST SECRETS ALONG THE WAY

When Mattie and Nora’s mother, the brilliant, troubled, and world-renowned Norwegian painter Ingrid Olssen, was on her deathbed, there was one promise she asked her daughters to make: Burn it all. Throw it all away. Ingrid didn’t want any of her art sold, didn’t want it celebrated.

Two years later, Mattie hasn’t done anything except for lock the pieces in a storage unit. She’s barely seen Nora since Nora skipped their mother’s funeral. Besides, she has her hands full raising the bold, creative teenage daughter she had when she was only a teenager herself. It was giving birth to Beanie that let her escape her mother’s house—that and the support of Beanie’s father, Gus.

But when Nora, an artist herself, falls deep into a mental health crisis of her own, she comes to live with Mattie and Beanie. And when their aunt Karo sets up the very last thing their mother ever would have wanted—an enormous retrospective of her work—the two of them somehow find themselves on the road trip of their lives: up the West Coast of the United States, with Beanie and their mother’s ashes in tow.

Perfect for fans of Daisy Jones and the Six and told partly in the form of the interviews that comprise Ingrid’s biography, Daughters is a tender, comic story of unpicking the scars of the past, and a must-read.

“A memorable portrayal of a family and damaged relationships painted with all the color, ambition, texture, and psychological complexity that makes for richly rewarding, stand-out fiction.”—Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize–winning author of Girl, Woman, Other