The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes
Tatiana buleac author Monica Cure translator
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Deep Vellum Publishing
Published:12th Mar '26
Should be back in stock very soon
From one of Moldova’s most celebrated writers, The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes is a complex coming-of-age story unraveling the fragile, complicated, redemptive relationship between a mother and her son.
Aleksy still remembers the last summer he spent with his mother in Northern France. At eighteen, eager to fly the nest and escape a family still grief-stricken by the death of his sister years earlier, these lazy months in the countryside are akin to torture. And then, his mother tells him she’s dying.
Fourteen years later, at the urging of his psychiatrist, Aleksy relives the memory of the summer when everything changed, shaken once again by the emotions that besieged him when they arrived in that small French village. For fans of Claire Keegan and Elena Ferrante, this is a story of reconciliation, of three months in which mother and son finally lay down their weapons to make peace with each other and with themselves.
“Brief and profound… “Green Eyes” is a beautiful novel, owing as much to the acuity of the dialogue and the strangeness of its metaphors (like the “bloody sunflower field” whose stalks are “popping out all the flowers row by row like a bunch of fish eyes”) as to Tibuleac’s storytelling. Like a literary origamist, the author intricately folds in plot details so that each new revelation forces you to reconsider the shape of the whole narrative.” —The New York Times
“Țîbuleac offers a wryly tender exploration of grief, rage, and the fraught process of repairing a broken parent-child relationship. This slim but powerful novel will stay with readers.” —Publishers Weekly
“The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes is a season of ruptures—of immigrants in a third country, the fraught relationship between a mother and her mentally ill son, a body succumbing to illness, a family broken by loss. In Țîbuleac’s telling, these sites become the ground of profound transformation.” —Asymptote Magazine
“This is a portrait of the artist at once grandiose and abject—as pervert Christ locked in the tomb, fingering his wounds; with the viewer as voyeur at the keyhole—but Țîbuleac comes by it honestly and develops it convincingly.” —Cleveland Review of Books
“Tatiana Țîbuleac’s The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes is a gut-punch of a novel. Emotionally intense, unvarnished, and at times devastating, the narrator’s arresting voice draws the reader into the messiness of grief, love, and forgiveness, serving as stinging proof of just how much the human spirit can take.” —On the Seawall
ISBN: 9781646054091
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
150 pages