Advance Praise for Motherclown
“Harriet Alida Lye’s extraordinary Motherclown is a gorgeously crafted, heart-wrenching examination of the most complicated of love stories: that between a mother and daughter. I adored it!” —Carley Fortune, #1 NYT bestselling author of Every Summer After and One Golden Summer
“Motherclown has a heart that keeps beating if you try to put it down. It’s beautiful ideas conveyed in the loveliest sentences; it’s how relatable it is to feel lost and yearning as a young woman and then all over again in midlife—but it’s mostly that Harriet Alida Lye has a voice so distinct, so smart and real and delightful, you just want to stay in her head and never leave.” —Ashley Audrain, NYT bestselling author of The Push
“In Motherclown, the beautiful and the bleak are intimately entangled, and yet hope always wins. There is so much propulsion and energy in the story, alongside the universal search for belonging but also differentiation. With her distinctive blend of lush language and honest intelligence, Harriet Alida Lye deftly examines the push and pull between mothers and daughters and the search for wholeness in oneself.” —Janika Oza, bestselling author of A History of Burning, winner of the APALA Award for Literature
“Motherclown is a stunning, explosive novel. Harriet Alida Lye writes with generosity, clarity, and grace—even as she gives us two characters who wound as deeply as they love. Mothers and daughters have a uniquely terrifying power over one another, and Lye captures the beauty of this connection and its sorrow in wise and shimmering sentences. She draws northern Paris with strokes so vivid you can feel the light on your face. Finishing this book, I felt the kind of grief you feel when you’ve been in extraordinary hands and then are set down, gently, and must interpret the world for yourself again.” —Emma Knight, NYT bestselling author of The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus
“Catherine and Elise are fascinating yet frustrating, empathetic yet unyielding, and fully alive in all their complexity. They attain particular resonance against the backdrop of a Paris that we rarely see on the page, an astute depiction of how the City of Light often illuminates that which we most long to keep in the dark. Motherclown is remarkable.” —Nafkote Tamirat, author of The Parking Lot Attendant, a NYT Notable Book of the Year
Harriet Alida Lye is the award-winning author of The Honey Farm, Natural Killer, Let It Destroy You, and the forthcoming novel Motherclown. She is also the co-author of a children’s picture book called Serge the Snail Without a Shell. Her essays and reporting have been published in The Globe & Mail, The New York Times, and more. She teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies, and she works with authors as a mentor and editor at Flying Books and Humber College. She has lived in Halifax, Paris, Amsterdam, New York, and now lives in Toronto with her partner, their two children, and two dogs.