Kate Walbert

Where She Went Kate Walbert

A stunning debut collection of interconnected stories charting the lives of a mother and daughter--together and apart--over four decades

The linked stories in Kate Walbert's debut collection, Where She Went, examine the contemporary predicament of a family without geographic roots. The first half of the book chronicles the life of Marion Clark, a company wife who repeatedly packs the household and accompanies her husband around the globe with a "melancholy view before her of what seemed like endless houses with endless garages and endless kitchen windows." In the stories that follow, her free-spirited adult daughter Rebecca continues the family legacy of wandering, traveling farther and farther afield, seeking to fulfill her mother's thwarted aspirations. But Rebecca's world is one viewed with a slightly off-kilter eye, one that invokes Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, Mohammed's faithful followers at Topkapi Palace, as well as the landscapes of Italy and Jamaica, Istanbul and Paris.

From a patchwork of communication that unfolds between mother and daughter, Walbert creates a narrative that is both fractured and lyrical. Where She Went is an epic for our times--an Odyssey that takes home on the road.

"Where She Went contains many quick flashes of beauty . . . it goes far, and takes us with it." --The New York Times Book Review

"Lyrical, sad, beautiful, and triumphant stories of journeys deep inside one's soul." --Edwidge Danticat

* A New York Times Notable Book

* Kate Walbert has been called "one of the season's most promising new writers" (Publishers Weekly) and "a writer we should watch for in years to come" (Booklist)