Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes—and dead calm—of grief. Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, it is an uncategorisable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence.

‘Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter is an intense, original, and fiercely intelligent work. Eschewing the smooth narration of the conventional memoir and its false confidence in the past as a fixed record of truths, Zambreno interrogates her memories of her mother. She circles and prods the pains and pleasures of her child-self. She investigates images and texts, recalled from life and from books, to create a complex web of associations around a woman who has been dead for years, but who lives on as both a secret and a wound. Book of Mutter is that rare text, which dares to face the immense power of the mother.’ – Siri Hustvedt‘Book of Mutter is an invasive text. Kate Zambreno’s deep attentiveness opens new ways of seeing the work of art in time. Both a tribute to past lives and a philosophy of the present, Book of Mutter is magnetic, heartrending, and visionary.’ – Sofia Samatar‘Zambreno’s work is an exercise in semiotics, a study of meaning-making, for things that seem intimate, foundational, and basic to being human: history, memory, mother, mourning.’ – *Publishers Weekly *(starred review)