“Beautiful and breathtakingly expansive, Molly Falls to Earth captures the delicate and dramatic pull of relationships in a city that swallows people up and hides them in plain sight. The beauty of great art and choreography, the unfillable voids and grand seizures that rule us, and the fragile and tough connections of human relationships are distilled here in perfect prose. An absolutely resplendent novel.”
“An enthralling debut novel by Governor General’s Literary Awards finalist Maria Mutch that is an inventive exploration of time, absence and desire.”
Missing People & Lost Love
In late January 2010, choreographer Molly Volkova has a seizure on a crowded Manhattan sidewalk.
As Molly experiences the singularity of the seizure over the course of seven minutes, she is haunted by her past: memories of love and infidelity, thoughts of her family and her work, and of the city itself. She also reflects on the disappearance of a lover she last saw ten years earlier, his sister, and the secrets that connect all three of them.
Flickering through time and space and from character to character, Molly Falls to Earth forms a constellation around the spot where Molly lies on the edge of Washington Square Park. Interwoven throughout are documentary segments featuring the voices of others who search for the lost, obsessed with those who have gone missing.
With her extraordinary ability to capture the unimaginable, Maria Mutch takes us deep into a stormy world in which people disappear without going anywhere, and appear to be present while travelling vast distances. —S&S Canada
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a new choreography of the heart
“From Joyce to Woolf to Ambrose Bierce, the challenge of expressing the infinite multitude that inhabits any single human minute persists. In this earthy, wry, passionate, and unexpected novel, Mutch dances us with a new choreography of the heart. It’s a beautiful, symphonic piece of work, at once grounded and fully electric.”
From the Notebook
