Tangerapple

"This lush, revelatory debut narrates the decades-spanning love story of two women across the divide of consciousness, as one lies immobilized and the other sits vigil by her bedside. The intertwined eras of seventy-year-olds Penny and Florence-white and Black, a sound engineer and a painter-unfold before us in a world where deeply felt desires often manifest as physical objects. In 2018, a mysterious tangerine-apple shines on the windowsill of Penny's upstate New York hospital room, where she drifts in a coma as Florence paints and talks to her. Unable to reply ("All is mist. All is quickness. So I must speak from here"), Penny summons the 1970s, when meeting the fiery, outspoken Florence, poolside in L.A. in an orange bikini, brought joyous fulfillment in the wake of her twin sister's death; then their headlong 1980s in New York City, which saw Florence's explosion as an artist, and the 1990s childhood of their miraculous daughter Gift, about whom Penny still holds a secret she may never be able to tell her wife. A lesbian domestic epic unique in our literary landscape, Tangerapple describes love both experienced across decades and lived in the moment.