Sight

In Jessie Greengrass' dazzlingly brilliant debut novel, our unnamed narrator recounts her progress to motherhood, while remembering the death of her own mother ten years before, and the childhood summers she spent with her psychoanalyst grandmother.

"A dazzling obsessive entry in a burgeoning genre. Unusual and absorbing... the novel as a whole exudes a strange consoling power."  -  The New Yorker

It seemed, at times, an act of profound selfishness, to have a child so that I might become a parent; but selfish, too, to have a child and stay the same, or not to have one - unless the only honest choice would have been to try to become this kinder version of myself without the need to bring another into it...

"Sight delves into a lot in under 200 pages: mothers and daughters, birth and death, loss and grief, finding one's balance, the ardour and arduousness of scientific discovery. Readers willing to give themselves over to Greengrass' penetrating vision will surely expand theirs."  -  Heller McAlpin, NPR

Sight is about X-rays, psychoanalysis, and the origins of modern surgery. It is about being a parent, and being a child. Fiercely intelligent, brilliantly written and suffused with something close to forgiveness, it is a novel about how we see others and how we imagine ourselves.