Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction & Related items

WAIT

Gabriella Burnham

In her second novel, WAIT, Gabrielle Burnham offers readers a brilliant, coming of age story of sisterhood, family, and friendship in a less-than-idyllic life, set in a picturesque, idyllic resort town.

Elise's life has not been easy on beautiful Nantucket island. Having grown up with their mom, Gilda, who had often left her and her younger sister Sophie to care for themselves, while she worked long hours and, occasionally, disappeared for short periods of time, Elise is finally on the verge of having the life she's dreamed about. With her college graduation approaching, she is excited to reunite with Sophie and Gilda, and show them the world she's inhabited for the last four years. That is, until Sophie places a frantic call to Elise to tell her that Gilda has gone missing.

Skipping her graduation ceremony, Elise returns to her childhood home to search for their missing mother, until they discover that she had been arrested on her way home from work by ICE and deported to São Paulo, Brazil. As Elise and Sophie desperately try to find a way to bring their mom back home and figure out where they're going to live, they're offered help by Elise's best friend and gregarious socialite Sheba to live in the guest house of the summer mansion she's inherited from her grandfather. But Elise soon finds herself confronted with the emotional and material conditions that have put her family in this situation in the first place.

Inspired by Burnham's childhood on Nantucket, and written with witty and deliberate, searing prose, WAIT captures a family dripping in love, but faced with the fractured societal issues of immigration, class, and identity in the U.S.

Gabriella Burnham holds an MFA in creative writing from St. Joseph's College and has been awarded fellowships to Yaddo and MacDowell, where she was named a Harris Center Fellow. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in Harper's Bazaar. She lives with her partner in Brooklyn, New York.

Available products
Book Published 2024-05-21 by One World
Book Published 2024-06-11 by One World

Comments

Wait is beautiful, heartfelt, and transcendent - a carefully crafted portrayal of motherhood, sisterhood, and friendship put to the ultimate test. I found myself caring deeply about these characters and wanting to know desperately what was going to happen to them next. Wait is also the best account of year-round Nantucket Island that I've ever read.

Gabriella Burnham's sophomore novel, 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. Burnham examines how this strength is derived, not from the individual alone, but from their ties to their community: their sisters, mothers, friends, and neighbors. Reading this novel, it was as if I could feel the Nantucket sea breeze whipping against my face and, at other times, caressing me.

Wait is a limpid and lovely, powerful and affecting novel of family ties, sisterhood's tender mercies, and the material conditions that shape our lives. Gabriella Burnham has given us a novel to remember, one that takes us on Nantucket and beyond - and we should gladly go.

An engaging mixture of psychology and socioeconomics.

Wise and richly layered, Wait is on one level a tender coming-of-age story set on beautiful beaches of Nantucket, and on another, a powerful inquiry into who gets to lay claim to American soil and call it home. Burnham's nuanced exploration of friendship and sisterhood, inherited wealth and housing insecurity, birthright and disenfranchisement will stay with me. I could not put this book down, and continued to think about it long after I emerged from its propulsive pages.

The sisters' sense of possibility balances against Burnham's... disconcertingly accurate insights on class. Whimsical and poignant, this is a story readers will return to again and again.

Imbued with hope and loss, Wait is a stunning examination of homecoming and familial devotion. Burnham's prose is sensuous and exacting. She writes about sisterhood, daughterhood, and friendship with deep wisdom and exquisite precision.