In Brood, a stunning new voice depicts one woman's attempt to keep her four chickens alive while reflecting on a recent loss.
'Fans of Elizabeth Strout and Anne Tyler will devour it.' - Daily Mirror
Darkly witty, deeply moving – Jackie Polzin's Brood is a startlingly original debut novel about motherhood, marriage and grief, full of sorrow, joy and unrelenting hope.
Over the course of a single year, our nameless narrator heroically tries to keep her small brood of four chickens alive despite the seemingly endless challenges that caring for another creature entails – and all the while struggling to confront her own recent loss. From the forty-below nights of a brutal Minnesota winter to a sweltering summer which brings a surprise tornado, she battles predators, bad luck, and the uncertainty of a future that may not look anything like the one she always imagined.
'Full of surprise, humor, grief, and wisdom.' - Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
'The most vibrant and compelling slice of life I’ve been privy to in a great while.' - Claire Lombardo, author of The Most Fun We Ever Had
'Splendidly unsentimental, quirky, witty, smart and a complete one-off.' - Clare Chambers, author of Small Pleasures
"Fans of Elizabeth Strout and Anne Tyler will devour it." - Daily Mirror
"Acutely observed . . . and the chickens provide metaphors for the world at large." - New Yorker
"Some novelists floodlight the world; Polzin uses a penlight to beautifully illuminate the least glamorous corners of a quotidian life . . . Her observation of the fragility and loveliness of daily life is so sharp and her commentary so droll, trenchant and precise, that the modest world she describes becomes almost numinous." - Washington Post
"Polzin writes beautifully about chickens; she is lovingly cleareyed about their “idiocy” and their dearness. She writes beautifully about everything: the sound of melting snow at the end of a Minnesota winter; a forgotten container of orange sherbet frosted over; private emotion. Her eye for physical detail is surprising, gimlet . . . It’s a pleasure to see what Polzin sees." - New York Times
"Written with such wry charm, such lightness of touch, you don’t realise how far it’s got under your skin until it’s too late to stop reading. I read Brood in one go. Very funny, very sad, very wise." - Lucy Caldwell
"Witty and profound . . . Told in short vignettes studded with breath-catching wisdom, this novel feels both delicate and sustaining from beginning to end." - Publisher's Weekly
"What pleasant alchemy is this novel? Polzin’s debut conjures humors and sadness in Minnesota, where the narrator ponders the potential of motherhood, a pending move, and the strangeness of raising animals who force us to consider the world in a new, slower, sideways perspective (which leads us to wonder: maybe the strangeness is us?)." - The Millions