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From New York Times bestselling author Edan Lepucki comes an enthralling saga about family secrets that grow more powerful with time, set against the magical, dangerous landscape of California

Ursa possesses a very special gift. She can travel through memory and revisit her past. After she flees her hometown for the counterculture glory of 1950's California, the intoxicating potential of her unique ability eventually draws a group of women into her orbit and into a ramshackle Victorian mansion in the woods outside Santa Cruz. Yet Ursa's powers come with a cost. Soon this cultish community of sisterhood takes an ominous turn, prompting her son, Ray, and his pregnant lover, Cherry, to flee their home for Los Angeles and reinvent themselves far from Ursa's insidious influence. But escaping their past won't be so easy. A series of mysterious events forces Cherry to abandon their baby, leaving Ray to raise Opal alone.

Now a teenager and still heartbroken over the abandonment of the mother she never knew, Opal must journey into her own past to reveal the generations of secrets that gave rise to the shimmering source of her family's painful legacy.

From the forests of Santa Cruz, to the 1980s glam of Melrose Avenue to a solitary mansion among the oil derricks off La Cienega Boulevard, and brimming with the double-edged capacity of memory to both heal and harm, Time's Mouth is a poignant and evocative excavation of the bonds that bind families together.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

EDAN LEPUCKI is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels California and Woman No. 17, as well as the editor of Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them. Her nonfiction has been published in The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Esquire Magazine, and The Cut, among other publications. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.

REVIEWS

Time, A Best Book of the Summer
Salon, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
Literary Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
Library Journal, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year

"It is a story of motherhood and disjunction, of self-making and villainy, of a remarkable power depicted and deployed on an intimate scale . . . The novel is a page-turning exploration of the intergenerational trauma of this very specific family with its unique gift, and the ways each new generation tries to heal itself . . . One of California's most anticipated books of the summer." --Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times

"Spanning decades and tracking the evolution of, and recovery from, intergenerational trauma, Time's Mouth is a dreamy, heartfelt tearjerker." --Arianna Rebolini, Bustle

"For fans of Matrix and The Girls, Time's Mouth is a mesmerizing and confident novel about power, desire, and the depths of our bonds." --Julia Haas, Literary Hub

"Lepucki's latest novel is, in a word, a trip, narrated by Time itself . . . Lepucki is known for combining domestic realism with a magical worldview and/or SF-adjacent elements (here, there's an isolation chamber in a box in the garage inspired by Reich's Orgone Accumulator) and for evoking California in all its real, surreal, and unreal glory. She does it again. This emotionally intense, wildly imaginative novel is both down-to-earth and out-to-lunch. One of a kind." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Edan Lepucki's engrossing third novel tackles so much about the physical and psychic terrain of California, with its hippies and hipsters, its oil derricks and redwoods. It's a beautiful book about a much-mythologized place, but its heart lives much closer to home: in the real and complex bond between parent and child." —Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind