Works by
Lisa Glass
(Writer)

Prince Rupert's Teardrop (2007, Amazon UK, Amazon US)
Mary undresses and wades into the boating lake. She dives and opens her eyes. In the blur, she perceives the outline of a head - she reaches... A dead bird. But she will keep searching. Because Mary's mother, Meghranoush - a ninety-four year-old survivor of the genocide of Armenians by the Turkish army early in the twentieth century - has vanished. Mary is already known to the police: a serial telephoner, a reporter of wrongdoing, a nuisance. Her doctor talks of mental illness. But what has happened is not just inside her head. A trail of glass birds mocks her. A silver thimble shines at the riverbed - a thimble that belonged to her mother. A glassblower burns a body in a furnace and uses the ash to color a vase. Rumors circulate of a monster stalking the women of Plymouth. Has her mother simply left - trying to escape the ghosts of genocide in her mind - or has she been abducted? It is left to this most unreliable and unpredictable of daughters to try to find her, in this moving, lyrical, and very powerful work.