'This captivating saga that feels as taut and fragile as the glass-blown ornaments at the center of it follows four generations of people who discover that one wrong choice can echo across the ages. This is a radiant exploration of a complex legacy.' - Publishers Weekly 'Wolfgang-Smith contends with vocation, identity, and the meaning of family in her appealing debut.As the various threads tie together, the author makes clever use of her central metaphor, considering glass as sharp, fluid, changeable, and even surprising-much like the characters she depicts. 'Olivia Wolfgang-Smith's first novel is a generation-spanning epic of family, inheritance, and identity…With richly drawn characters and deft storytelling, Glassworks is a beautifully crafted, memorable debut.' - Booklist (starred review) Simply put, this is a wonderful, wonderful book.' - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) 'This sophisticated debut from Wolfgang-Smith traces an evolving emotional legacy through four generations of a family while examining the basic question of 'how to love something without letting it have everything'…Wolfgang-Smith writes like a glass blower, patiently building and enhancing to create durable beauty. 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 stained-glass studio. 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. A gorgeously written and irresistibly intimate queer novel that follows one family across four generations to explore legacy and identity in all its forms.

Glassworks by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith