Gabriella Burnham

A young woman reunites with her teenage sister in their childhood home on Nantucket Island after their mother is deported in this alluring coming-of-age novel that "movingly tackles serious issues in one of America's premier vacation spots" (NPR). "Gabriella Burnham knows . . . the Nantucket of undocumented immigrants and broken families. . . . This tender novel allows us to rejoice when tiny windows of opportunities begin to open."--Imbolo Mbue, The New York Times Book ReviewA VULTURE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Elise is out dancing the night before her college graduation when her younger sister, Sophie, calls to tell her that their mom is nowhere to be found. Elise leaves on the next flight back to her childhood home, Nantucket Island, for the first time in nearly four years. The sisters soon learn that their mother was stopped by police on her way home from work and deported to S o Paulo, Brazil. Intent on bringing her mother back, Elise stays and secures the same job she had in high school: monitoring endangered birds. Meanwhile, her best friend from college, Sheba--a gregarious socialite and heir to a famed children's toy company--reveals that she has inherited her grandfather's summer mansion on Nantucket. Elise's worlds collide as she confronts the emotional and material conditions that have fractured her family, as well as the life in Brazil that her mother has had to leave behind. Told with penetrating insight, humor, and unexpected tenderness, Wait is a story about a family swimming against the social currents that erode bonds: housing precarity, immigration systems, and inherited wealth. But it is also a story about love, wit, and sisterhood, and how two sisters cling to each other in the midst of cataclysmic change, all the while dreaming about a better future.

A young woman reunites with her teenage sister in their childhood home on Nantucket Island after their mother disappears in this alluring coming-of-age novel from the acclaimed author of It Is Wood, It Is Stone. "Wait simultaneously illuminates the precariousness of young womanhood and existing as an immigrant in the United States. Reading this novel, it was as if I could almost feel the Nantucket sea breeze whipping against my face." --Daphne Palasi Andreades, author of Brown Girls Elise is out dancing the night before her college graduation when her younger sister, Sophie, calls to tell her that their mom is nowhere to be found. Elise leaves on the next flight back to her childhood home, Nantucket Island, for the first time in nearly four years. The sisters soon learn that their mother was stopped by police on her way home from work and deported to S o Paulo, Brazil. Intent on bringing her mother back, Elise stays and secures the same job she had in high school: monitoring endangered birds. Meanwhile, her best friend from college, Sheba--a gregarious socialite and heir to a famed children's toy company--reveals that she has inherited her grandfather's summer mansion on Nantucket. Elise's worlds collide as she confronts the emotional and material conditions that have fractured her family, as well as the life in Brazil that her mother has had to leave behind. Told with penetrating insight, humor, and unexpected tenderness, Wait is a story about a family swimming against the social currents that erode bonds: housing precarity, immigration systems, and inherited wealth. But it is also a story about love, wit, and sisterhood, and how two sisters cling to each other in the midst of cataclysmic change, all the while dreaming about a better future.

"A lush depiction of privilege and power, sex and stability . . . following three women in S o Paulo . . . It Is Wood, It Is Stone is an elegant arrival of a new talent."--Elle NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Good Housekeeping - Marie Claire - Harper's Bazaar - Publishers Weekly With sharp, gorgeous prose, It Is Wood, It Is Stone takes place over the course of a year in São Paulo, Brazil, in which two women's lives intersect. Linda, an anxious and restless American, has moved to São Paulo, with her husband, Dennis, who has accepted a yearlong professorship. As Dennis submerges himself in his work, Linda finds herself unmoored and adrift, feeling increasingly disassociated from her own body. Linda's unwavering and skilled maid, Marta, has more claim to Linda's home than Linda can fathom. Marta, who is struggling to make sense of complicated history and its racial tensions, is exasperated by Linda's instability. One day, Linda leaves home with a charismatic and beguiling artist, whom she joins on a fervent adventure that causes reverberations felt by everyone, and ultimately binds Marta and Linda in a profoundly human, and tender, way. An exquisite debut novel by young Brazilian American author Gabriella Burnham, It Is Wood, It Is Stone is about women whose romantic and subversive entanglements reflect on class and colorism, sexuality, and complex, divisive histories.