Let the Dark Flower Blossom

Praise for Norah Labiner:

"A splendid, leisurely meditation on the meaning of fame, identity, and love."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Labiner, narrating in several distinct and haunting voices, proves herself a metafictional adept. She succeeds in crafting an ambitious, poignant and sharp-tongued novel filled with secrets and ghosts, jealousy and love."—Publishers Weekly

Sheldon and Eloise Schell are twins, orphans, and the estranged college companions of the rich, scandalous, celebrated Roman Stone. Now Roman is dead, murdered with a pair of scissors in his living room, and Eloise and Sheldon must separately tease out the secrets—a burning house, a murdered girl—that were the one story they could never tell.

Moving between the muffled plush of wintry Chicago, the fogbound darkness of a Lake Superior island, and the even darker precincts of memory, Let the Dark Flower Blossom is a book about the pull of the closed door. It is about the small pleasure of being right, the tremendous thrill of doing wrong, and the lengths writers will go to—lie, steal, kill—to get the perfect story.

Norah Labiner is the author of three novels: Our Sometime Sister, Miniatures, and German for Travelers. She has received a Minnesota Book Award for Literary Fiction and fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been recognized by the American Library Association, the Jewish Book Council, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers series.