From New York Times bestselling author Edan Lepucki comes an
enthralling saga about family secrets that grow more powerful with time,
set against the magical, dangerous landscape of California
Ursa possesses a very special gift. She can travel through memory and
revisit her past. After she flees her hometown for the counterculture
glory of 1950's California, the intoxicating potential of her unique
ability eventually draws a group of women into her orbit and into a
ramshackle Victorian mansion in the woods outside Santa Cruz. Yet Ursa's
powers come with a cost. Soon this cultish community of sisterhood takes
an ominous turn, prompting her son, Ray, and his pregnant lover, Cherry,
to flee their home for Los Angeles and reinvent themselves far from
Ursa's insidious influence. But escaping their past won't be so easy. A
series of mysterious events forces Cherry to abandon their baby, leaving
Ray to raise Opal alone.
Now a teenager and still heartbroken over the abandonment of the mother
she never knew, Opal must journey into her own past to reveal the
generations of secrets that gave rise to the shimmering source of her
family's painful legacy.
From the forests of Santa Cruz, to the 1980s glam of Melrose Avenue to a
solitary mansion among the oil derricks off La Cienega Boulevard, and
brimming with the double-edged capacity of memory to both heal and harm,
Time's Mouth is a poignant and evocative excavation of the bonds that
bind families together.
