The Unknowing

Celebrated novelist Frances Oppenheimer has long been an enigma, a mystery even to her closest observer: her daughter. In the shadow of a family tragedy never spoken of, she has retreated even further, and her absence has loomed larger still. Now turning to the page herself, Frances' daughter finds she cannot move beyond the one subject she has spent her life researching. Combining inherited stories, overheard conversations, family heirlooms, and scenes of her own imagination, she sets out to assemble a portrait that may at last bring her mother into view. Precise and poignant, The Unknowing is a striking debut exploring how fiction refracts truth, how families create their own mythologies, and how we reinvent the people we love in order to understand ourselves.