From the best-selling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait
comes a spellbinding novel of two women connected across fifty years by
art, love, betrayals, secrets, and motherhood.
"An exquisitely sensual tale of love, motherhood, and other forms of
madness, The Hand That First Held Mine will unsettle, move, and haunt
you." --Emma Donoghue, author of Room
Lexie Sinclair is plotting an extraordinary life for herself.
Hedged in by her parents' genteel country life, she plans her escape to
London. There, she takes up with Innes Kent, a magazine editor who
introduces her to the thrilling, underground world of bohemian, post-war
Soho. She learns to be a reporter, to know art and artists, to embrace
her life fully and with a deep love at the center of it. And when she
finds herself pregnant, she doesn't hesitate to have the baby on her
own.
Later, in present-day London, a young painter named Elina dizzily
navigates the first weeks of motherhood. She doesn't recognize herself:
she finds herself walking outside with no shoes; she goes to the
restaurant for lunch at nine in the morning; she can't recall the small
matter of giving birth. But for her boyfriend, Ted, fatherhood is
calling up lost memories, with images he cannot place.
As Ted's memories become more disconcerting and more frequent, it seems
that something might connect these two stories--these two
women--something that becomes all the more heartbreaking and beautiful
as they all hurtle toward its revelation.
Praised by The Washington Post as a "breathtaking, heart-breaking
creation," The Hand That First Held Mine is a gorgeous and tenderly
wrought story about the ways in which love and beauty bind us together.
It is a gorgeous inquiry into the ways we make and unmake our lives, who
we know ourselves to be, and how even our most accidental legacies
connect us.
