Mother Tongue

“Mother Tongue is not only dramatic and engrossing, it is also insightful and wise. Read it! Read it! You will never forget it!”
—Jane Smiley, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and author of Perestroika in Paris (2020)

“Mother Tongue is a gripping and gorgeously written novel of identity, loss, and redemption.”
—Hilma Wolitzer, author of Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

“A beautiful, wise, spellbinding novel that dramatizes, in the most lucid prose, a woman's pursuit of her own lost identity. The shock of discovery reverberates from the beginning to the end. Mother Tongue is fiction at its best and boldest, with a penetrating focus on the restorative power of truth.”
—Joanna Scott, author of The Maniken and Careers for Women

“The 'what-if' question that triggered this novel evokes a nightmare scenario: What if I found out I was kidnapped when I was a baby? In beautifully precise prose that resonates like the best poetry, Kornblatt’s central character Nella/Naomi, the kidnap victim and a writer of fiction herself, discovers and creates her own lost story and the lost lives of all those linked to her.”
—Wayne Karlin, author of A Wolf by the Ear

“Mother Tongue is a tender and sensitive story about family secrets, loss, and recovery from loss; a wise and lyrical meditation on the nature of love.”
—Gail Jones, author of Our Shadows (2020)

“In Joyce Kornblatt’s exquisitely written novel, Mother Tongue, a middle-aged woman discovers her long-lost identity along with the layers of loss spiraling from her having been kidnapped at birth. The immediate and long-felt impacts of this tragic loss—crossing generations and continents—are explored with compassion, precision, and depth. Sympathetic characters, an abundance of human wisdom, and beautiful, lyrical prose combine to make Mother Tongue a wonderful read.”
—Elizabeth Poliner, author of As Close to Us as Breathing

“What a fully immersive reading experience! The writing is hypnotic, the story strange and irresistible, the insights into the human condition occasionally breathtaking.”
—Monica Wood, author of When We Were the Kennedys, The One-in-a-Million Boy, and Ernie’s Ark.

“Lucid, humane and gorgeously written. In a slim novel with a big vision, Joyce Kornblatt sets her scarred but hopeful characters free to discover that loss is the mother tongue of us all—and that rupture contains the possibility of wholeness.”
—Rona Maynard, Author of My Mother's Daughter

“Mother Tongue is a beautiful, arresting novel. The clarities, prisms, temperaments, and tenacious obsessions are transfixing. If one question every novel asks is, 'how does one define existence?' then Mother Tongue’s difficult answer is that what keeps us together and what keeps us apart is made tangible by both reality and perception.”
—David Biespiel, author of A Place of Exodus and The Education of a Young Poet

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