The Night Sky A Novel [Paperback]

TheNight Skyis a moving novel about the solitary moral courage of a women raising a child alone and the complex resilience of family. Ivy Slovak is a jewelry designer and artist whose days are absorbed by the struggle to make an unreliable paycheck cover the needs of her infant son. Hungry for the freedom of the world outside her window, Ivy is haunted by the memory of her mother, who abandoned her when she was seven years old. She recalls the years spent with her loving but itinerant father, wandering the desert, hoping somehow to find the troubled, beautiful woman who had left them both. With quiet eloquence and deep compassion,The Night Skyestablishes Morris as one of contemporary American literature's foremost chroniclers of the secrets and strengths of the human spirit.

Mary Morrisis the author of the novelsHouse Arrest,Crossroads, andThe Waiting Room; two travel memoirs,Nothing to DeclareandWall to Wall; and the award-winning story collectionsVanishing Animalsand Other StoriesandThe Bus of Dreams. Her most recent story collection isThe Lifeguard. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Marvelous, spiritually charged fiction, an example of the contemporary American novel at its best. Christopher Tilghman, The Los Angeles Times Book Review

A haunting tale . . . Ivy Slovak's life is not one a reader will soon forget. Roxanna Robinson, The New York Times Book Review

Morris's novel joins a rich literary tradition of women who, in the absence of mothers, flounder in their search for womanhood, who are fused to phantoms they fear they will never shake off. Barbara Lazear Ascher, The Washington Post Book World

A quiet celebration of motherhood--and fatherhood, too. Told in eloquent, vivid snatches, it's a fast-paced yet deeply moral story that stimulates and satisfies the mind,l3: