The Emilys
Eve is at a breaking point. Alone with her two children in Massachusetts while her husband pursues his music career in New York City, she’s frustrated, bored, and above all, lonely when she runs into Demeter, a childhood friend with whom she shared one transformative summer.
Demeter is as beautiful and charismatic as Eve remembers, but she’s also distraught. Demeter’s daughter, like a growing number of others, young and old, cannot go outside during the day. No one knows why, and doctors are skeptical that these people—soon dubbed Emilys, after a famously reclusive local poet—are telling the truth. But Eve believes her friend, whose company revives her and gives her purpose. She will help Demeter—if she can just figure out how.
The Emilys is a capacious, profound book about how love of all kinds—love between friends, between mothers and kids, between strangers and neighbors, love for the earth—opens up new possibilities. It asks: How will we learn to live in an altered world? How will we keep each other safe? And when the darkness comes, how will we find joy?
Select Praise
The Emilys is a smart, soulful novel brimming with wonder, grace, and mystery.
Claire Vaye Watkins, author of I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness
Heartfelt and thought-provoking, The Emilys is a timely page-turner about motherhood, friendship, sacrifice, and survival in our no-longer-quite-natural world. With wit, lyricism, and compassion, Abel brings to life fallible, deeply human characters whose resilience speaks to our moment with urgency and grace.
Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness
Heather Abel has written a prismatic, brilliant novel that teaches us how to live—and more important, to love—in a natural world that is rapidly changing, even as our all-too-human yearnings stay the same. Rich in language, in philosophy and science, and most significant, in hope—The Emilys is its own cure, and you’ll be infinitely better for reading it.
Julia Fine, author of The Upstairs House
This kaleidoscopic marvel of a novel is many things at once: propulsive climate-crisis mystery, nuanced portrait of women’s friendships, wry reckoning with the complexities of parenting, and love letter to our imperiled Earth. Heather Abel has written an urgent, beautiful study of how we try to take care of one another in a threatened and threatening world, and of the astonishing ways our fates are intertwined.
Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks
A gorgeous and compelling novel. Abel makes it not only possible but deeply pleasurable to consider uncertainty and absence—and the communities that form around them. This is a book to read with friends.
Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love
A labyrinthine and heartfelt look at the trials and triumphs of collective action. . . . Abel explores a rich tapestry of themes: the heartbreak and power of female friendship, the isolation that can exist at the heart of motherhood, class tensions, climate change, medical gaslighting, the pandemic, and much more. If this seems like a lot, it is, but Abel’s writing is never grim and the swirl of theme and plot and character is vibrant.”
Kirkus Reviews