Green Eye Blue

Description

For readers of The Price of Salt, a mesmerizing and sensual work of literary fiction spanning the mid-twentieth century, from Newfoundland to New York City.

“You can feel all your past lives, can’t you? The person you used to be.”

In 1959, a young woman steps off a train and doesn’t look back. Hiding behind a false name and an invented past, she hopes to escape everything she’s ever known.

So begins the story of Iris Woodsen, the daughter of Newfoundland’s most prestigious merchant family. Adored by her father and emotionally abused by her mother, Iris grows up shrouded in shame and insecurity. When her desires are pathologized, she is sent to an institution to be cured. She is forced to marry a man she does not love, pushed into a life she does not wish to live. She decides the only way out is to disappear, but her husband is relying on her to escape his own past, and will stop at nothing to find her.

Spanning the 1930s to the 1960s, and covering a vast terrain from Newfoundland to New York City, Green Eye Blue chronicles a time of great social upheaval, with the stirrings of second-wave feminism and sexual liberation. Iris’s world is soon populated with people on the fringes—spiritualist mediums, mafia bosses, immigrants, drag queens, and art dealers—allowing her to create the community she’s always searched for. As long as she’s never found.

A mesmerizing and sensual work of literary fiction from the critically acclaimed author of Quiet Time, Green Eye Blue is a story of trauma and healing, of breaking family cycles, and finding one’s own path to authenticity.

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