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Sign up todayGlaciers
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Learn moreSummary
Isabel is a single, twentysomething thrift-store shopper and collector of remnants, things cast off or left behind by others. Glaciers follows Isabel through a day in her life in which work with damaged books in the basement of a library, unrequited love for the former soldier who fixes her computer, and dreams of the perfect vintage dress move over a backdrop of deteriorating urban architecture and the imminent loss of the glaciers she knew as a young girl in Alaska.
Glaciers unfolds internally, the action shaped by Isabel’s sense of history, memory, and place, recalling the work of writers such as Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Virginia Woolf. For Isabel, the fleeting moments of one day can reveal an entire life. While she contemplates loss and the intricate fissures it creates in our lives, she accumulates the stories—the remnants—of those around her and she begins to tell her own story.
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Reviews
Lyrical and luminous.—Publishers Weekly, Starred ReviewAn Alaskan childhood and dreams of faraway cities such as Amsterdam inform Alexis M. Smith's Glaciers, a delicate debut novel set in Portland. . . . that reveals in short, memory-soaked postcards of prose a day in the life of twentysomething library worker Isabel. —Elle
This novella is a tribute to quiet, meaningful moments: a languid morning, an assessment in a mirror, a chance encounter. Glaciers is unhurried but precise; Glaciers is vast but expertly contained; Glaciers is perfect. —Powell's
Delighted me the whole way through.—Maria Semple, New York Times Book Review
A spare, beautifully written first novel.—Library Journal
Truly beautiful and profound.—Parnassus Musing
Glaciers, Alexis Smith’s brilliant debut novel, is filled with kaleidoscopic pleasures. Using prose as clear as pure, cold air, Smith moves the narrative vertically as well as horizontally, each ticking minute yielding more insights into a young woman’s life revealed over one single day. The past, present, and imaginary future stream into beautifully unstable geometries: Isabel's childhood snows from her youth in Alaska are juxtaposed against her adult trip to a vintage thrift store; her hopes for an evening party push against the echoes of war that haunt a young soldier whom she loves. Line by line, in and out of time, this is a haunted, joyful, beautiful book—a true gift. —Karen Russell
A delicate and piercing first novel. Glaciers is like a vintage dress: charming, understated and glinting with memories of loneliness and love. —Jane Mendelsohn
Alexis M. Smith's Glaciers is a quietly powerful fairy tale. Smith's voice, patient and understated and precise captures the poetry of loss and longing. —Cara Hoffman
Glaciers is a carefully precise and beautiful meditation on one young woman’s restless heart. It resonates like a haunting postcard from someone else’s life. —Kevin Sampsell
I cannot easily remember the last time I've been so deeply moved as in this quiet treasure.—Douglas A. Martin Expand reviews
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