Synopsis
In this moving, layered novel of memory and family, celebrated author Richard Mason tells the story of a mother and daughter, one caught in the past, one racing toward the future.
Joan is eighty years old, a gifted amateur pianist who can no longer play because of her arthritic hands. Joan’s daughter, Eloise, is an ambitious hedge fund manager who has decided to move her mother to an assisted-living facility. As a last hurrah, Eloise plans a trip to Joan’s childhood home in South Africa. What Joan discovers there summons long-buried secrets and opens up an entirely new world. Natural Elements is a dazzling tale of history and longing, and the high-stakes, full-tilt embrace of life.
The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley
Natural Elements is a mature, inventive, ambitious novel. Among other things, it is about investment bubbles and the workings of the commodities markets; scientific research and the perilous paths down which it can go; retirement communities, nursing homes and other institutions into which we dump people for whom we do not have, or to whom we do not want to give, sufficient time; the tensions within families and the ties that somehow survive them; the aftershocks of a distant war that brutalized innocent people and left memories haunted by loss. To all of this Mason brings a clear, inviting prose style that resists at every turn the temptation to be showy.