In 1986, Edward's child, Novak-just Novak-is an acrobatic window washer cleaning Manhattan high-rises, who gets caught up in the plight of Cecily, a small town girl remade as a gender-bending Broadway ingénue.Īnd in 2015, Cecily's daughter Flip-a burned-out stoner trapped in a bureaucratic job firing cremains into keepsake glass ornaments-resolves to break the cycle of inherited secrets, reaching back through the generations in search of a family legacy that feels true.įor readers of Mary Beth Keane, Min Jin Lee, and Rebecca Makkai, Glassworks is 'an era-spanning, family and chosen-family following, marvel of a debut.' (CJ Hauser, author of FAMILY OF ORIGIN) Her son, Edward, wants to be a man of faith but struggles with the complexities of the mortal world while apprenticing at a

But when Bohemian naturalist and glassblower Ignace Novak reignites Agnes's passion for science, Agnes begins to imagine a different life, and she sets her mind to getting it.Īgnes's desperate actions breed secrecy, and the resulting silence echoes into the future. After years as an independent woman of fortune, influential with the board of a prominent university because of her financial donations, she is now subject to the whims of an abusive, spendthrift husband. In 1910, Agnes Carter makes the wrong choice in marriage. And finally in 2015, Cecily’s daughter Flip in an attempt to move out of her girlfriend’s apartment and get her life back together, takes a job at a small business that turns human remains into glass keepsakes (not paperweights) and learns more about a family heirloom that’s surely still in her possession–a delicate glass bee.Ī gorgeously written and irresistibly intimate queer novel that follows one family across four generations to explore legacy and identity in all its forms. Novak, Edward’s queer child, traumatized by the rapid spread of AIDS has become a reclusive Manhattan window washer taking care of her broken father when she falls for a young Broadway starlet Cecily Miracle in 1986. It’s 1938 and Agnes’s ne’er do well son has failed his seminary exams and is shuffled off to be an apprentice glassmaker before he meets an enthralling young woman with her own complicated family. In 1910 Agnes Carter, a scientist and formidable woman on the board of Harvard, commissions the acclaimed glassblower Ignace Novak for a series of works at the same time as her hasty marriage to an abuser shatters her identity and position. Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s accomplished debut Glassworks is a generational drama linked by an intricate glass bee through four generations exploring female power and its loss.

Glassworks by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith