Unfurled

What are the boundaries between imagination and delusion? When Ella’s father John dies unexpectedly, she learns that the past she believed in never really happened. For more than twenty years, Ella has learned to live without her mother, learned to forget the woman with paranoid delusions who abandoned their small family the summer Ella turned ten, learned to accept the likely scenario that her homeless mother died on the streets. But John’s accident changes everything. The unsettling questions raised by John’s death and Maggie’s unwanted reappearance send Ella on a journey to discover the truth – the truth about the woman who abandoned her and the man who raised her and why they kept their story a secret. This is a novel about loss and forgiveness, about imagination and that gift’s more menacing form, delusion.

Michelle Bailat-Jones is a writer and translator. Her debut novel, Fog Island Mountains (Tantor 2014), won the inaugural Christopher Doheny Award from The Center for Fiction and Audible. Her fiction, poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared in various journals, including: The Kenyon Review, the Rumpus, Public Pool, the View from Here, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Quarterly Conversation, PANK, Spolia Mag, Two Serious Ladies, Cerise Press and the Atticus Review. Michelle is the Translations Editor at Necessary Fiction and runs a literary blog called Pieces (www.michellebailatjones.com). She was born in Japan, grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and now lives in Switzerland.