Have you ever lost your way?
ELLIE, MAMAN, Samira’s debut #OwnVoices book club fiction novel, marries her love for imperfect characters who navigate a complex web of cultural identities and desires with what interests her the most—the underbelly of marriage, intimacy, and female relationships.
Seven years went by and nothing changed. Ellie, once a confident artist, hasn’t picked up a paintbrush. She is still not speaking to her unconventional, self-assured, Iranian mother, Mariam. And she has little faith her corporate-climbing husband, Omar, won’t move them—yet again—for his career. He promises the old farmhouse in Kingston, Ontario—a place she feels unusual kinship—is the last time, and Ellie reluctantly believes him.
But when Omar threatens having an affair, she recognizes, deep inside, that her mother was right—her marriage was doomed from the start.
As the snow thaws on the abandoned barn, Ellie catches a taste of her old spontaneity again, then spirals out of control in the best way. She meets Paul, who longs for conversation. Her artistic sense awakens, and she embraces spontaneity, finding community, love, and confidence. She chases her personal renaissance and reconnects with Mariam, who has a radically new life now despite wounds she’s covered up. But Omar threatens to uproot Ellie’s momentum—and her new beloved home.
When Mariam learns of her daughter’s predicament, she won’t be able to resist the urge to meddle (like she did last time with Ellie’s female mentor), opening the lid to secrets she’s kept from Ellie—and the mystery behind her childhood home. Both women will have to face their blind spots and unspoken truths to accept each other’s choices, or Ellie will become what Mariam detests the most: a woman who surrenders her talents in marriage. But can a restless artist whose life intertwines with her mother’s find herself despite the cracks in her mother’s fragmented truths?
ELLIE, MAMAN is complete at 89,000 words with a sprinkling of phonetic Farsi. Combining the complexity of Sarah Manguso’s Liars with the relentless desire of Lily King’s Writers & Lovers, ELLIE, MAMAN, a lyrical uncovering of mother-daughter intimacy, is the story of broken relationships and belonging—and the art that grows from them.
We hope you agree that ELLIE, MAMAN is a gripping, slow-burn story of the very best kind.
Chapter One: Ellie
Kingston, Ontario, 2014
The only thing I cook by the book is a boiled egg. I use the same gray pot with faint scratch marks to boil water and a slotted spoon to gently lower them in. With head slightly tilted, I wait until a stream of tiny bubbles trails each one. Omar says it’s the best skill I got from watching all those online videos after we move from a place. I crack open the kitchen window a tiny bit before taking them off the stove. March in Ontario smells like still, cold air and thawing grass. After shaking them around in cold water, I roll the egg on the countertop until the shell cracks and peels off. If Mariam was still in my life, she’d have said, “Don’t use tap water, Ellie, maman, use ice water.” My mother calling me mother. Me calling her by her first name. That’s our interchangeable dysfunction.
Samira Shakib Bregeth 