The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes - by Tatiana Ț & îbuleac (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From one of Moldova's most celebrated writers, The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes is a complex coming-of-age story unraveling the fragile, complicated, redemptive relationship between a mother and her son.

Aleksy still remembers the last summer he spent with his mother in Northern France. At eighteen, eager to fly the nest and escape a family still grief-stricken by the death of his sister years earlier, these lazy months in the countryside are akin to torture. And then, his mother tells him she's dying.

Fourteen years later, at the urging of his psychiatrist, Aleksy relives the memory of the summer when everything changed, shaken once again by the emotions that besieged him when they arrived in that small French village. For fans of Claire Keegan and Elena Ferrante, this is a story of reconciliation, of three months in which mother and son finally lay down their weapons to make peace with each other and with themselves.

Review Quotes

"Țîbuleac offers a wryly tender exploration of grief, rage, and the fraught process of repairing a broken parent-child relationship. This slim but powerful novel will stay with readers." --Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Tatiana Țîbuleac is the award-winning Moldovan-Romanian author of The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes and The Glass Garden. She was born in Chișinău, Moldova, where she began her career as a journalist, working in print media and as a reporter and news anchor for PRO TV Chișinău, Moldova's leading independent TV station. She also worked in Moldova for UNICEF before leaving for Paris, where she now lives. Her debut as a writer came in 2014 with a collection of short stories, followed by two novels that received multiple awards, including the 2019 European Union Prize for Literature for The Glass Garden. Her books have been translated into 17 languages.

Monica Cure is a Romanian-American writer, translator, and dialogue specialist, as well as a two-time Fulbright grant award winner. Her poetry and translations have been published in journals internationally, and she's the author of the book Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century (University of Minnesota Press). Her translation of The Censor's Notebook by Liliana Corobca (Seven Stories Press) was awarded with the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is currently based in Bucharest.