Felt
To what emotional extremes will you go to recover lost memories, or surrender to ones that are impossible to erase?
Awards
- Short-listed, New Brunswick Book Awards — Mrs. Dunster’s Award for Fiction 2025
- Short-listed, Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award 2025
Description
A family’s history is woven, unravelled, and rewoven into a tapestry spanning three generations.
Museum curator Matthew Reade’s career and marriage are in crisis in the aftermath of a recent exhibition. When he gets a worrying phone call about his fiercely independent ninety-six-year-old mother, Penelope, Matt uses the excuse of a research project to return to the Maritimes to check on her for himself. Once home, he finds he must stay on to help navigate her new diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.
The more Matt talks to his mother while preparing to move her into the local long-term care home, the more she reveals about his grandmother’s emigration from Norway to New Brunswick before World War I, the murky origins of the family handcraft business, her own complicated past relationships, and Matt’s beginnings. But how much of it can he trust and how much has been rewritten by the disease?
Reviews
“This is a beautiful book, moving, thought-provoking, sometimes funny and curiously reassuring about the inevitable, inescapable, always messy course of life.”
— Heather McBriarty, The Miramichi Reader
“Felt serves as a poignant reminder of how elusive memories can become with the ravages of time.”
— Amy Wilson, Novels Alive
“Felt is a heartfelt paean to memory and the vagaries of time.”
— Michael Magras, Shelf-Awareness
“Blagrave’s characters are sharply drawn, individualized and achingly flawed, and his richly nuanced prose brings the historic Saint Andrews setting alive on the page. … Mark Blagrave weaves past and present together into a moving and memorable tapestry.”
— Ian Colford, The Seaboard Review
“Deftly spanning three generations of the Reade family in Charlotte County, Felt considers how we remember our past selves, the importance of place, and how art and family ties are defined by recollection and forgetting. … Felt, like all of Blagrave’s novels to date, is a text worth looking over more than once.”
— Julia Wright, Billie