Product Description: Why lies He in such mean estateWhere ox and ass are feeding?Good Christian, fear: for sinners hereThe silent Word is pleading.—Willam Chatterton Dix, "What Child Is This?", 1865Disaster can be explosive and theatrical or quiet and ominous...read more

The Gin Closet is a stunning debut novel about broken families, mended trust, poverty, privilege, and the sheer and inescapable brutality of love.After a slew of family fights and traumatic events, teenager Tilly Rudolph abandons her middle-class home in the suburbs and flees to the seedy underworld of Reno. She scrapes to get by, working as a prostitute and nursing various addictions, eventually drinking herself to the brink of death in a dusty trailer park.Thirty years later, Stella is a young woman in New York who feels lost in the life she has constructed. When her dying grandmother reveals the existence of an aunt she never knew about, Stella feels compelled to find her.The Gin Closet unravels the strange and powerful intimacy that forms between Tilly and her niece Stella. Its poetic narration shifts between their perspectives as they move to San Francisco to make a home with Abe, Tilly's overworked and melancholic son, building a fragile triangle that soon breaks under its own weight.With an uncanny ear for dialogue and a witty, unflinching candor about sex, love, and power, Leslie Jamison writes achingly about the cruelties that unhinge us, the beauties that clarify us, the addictions that deform us, those fleeting possibilities of grace that fade as quickly as they come. The Gin Closet marks the debut of a striking new talent in fiction.