A haunting, indelible novel of collective grief, resistance, and the life-affirming virtue of testimony

A. is an amateur translator, living alone in an unforgiving, late-capitalist metropolis. Adrift and burdened by debt following a medical trauma, her nights are spent on the dance floor. There, she encounters N., who shares her numbed state and sometimes her bed.

Among N.'s meagre possessions, A. comes across a book about an unnamed foreign town of disappearing boys. The book, Field Notes, documents the stories of a community of mothers who assemble to mourn their missing sons. When a near-assault stuns A. out of her inertia, she takes off for the city where Field Notes was written in search of its author and the end of his story. But A.'s digging leads her instead to the traces of a murdered poet, a mysterious woman whose legacy will intersect unexpectedly and pivotally with A.'s own life.

Poignant and profoundly humane, Mass Mothering is told through layered voices, written fragments, and recorded testimonies. It is a luminous story of the mutuality of grief, the aftershocks of violence in a globalized era, and the world-bending force of a mother's love.

Sarah Bruni
Sarah Bruni is a writer, educator, editor, and translator. She holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Washington University in St. Louis and an MA in Latin American Studies from Tulane University. She is the author of the novel The Night Gwen Stacy Died, which published in 2013. Around that time Bruni stepped away from writing fiction, choosing instead to pursue an academic path. Ten year later, she returned to fiction—and to this novel in particular—as a response to her graduate-level field research.