Time's Mouth

From New York Times bestselling author Edan Lepucki comes an enthralling saga about family secrets that grow more powerful with time, set against the magical, dangerous landscape of California

Ursa possesses a very special gift. She can travel through memory and revisit her past. After she flees her hometown for the counterculture glory of 1950’s California, the intoxicating potential of her unique ability eventually draws a group of women into her orbit and into a ramshackle Victorian mansion in the woods outside Santa Cruz. Yet Ursa’s powers come with a cost. Soon this cultish community of sisterhood takes an ominous turn, prompting her son, Ray, and his pregnant lover, Cherry, to flee their home for Los Angeles and reinvent themselves far from Ursa’s insidious influence. But escaping their past won’t be so easy. A series of mysterious events forces Cherry to abandon their baby, leaving Ray to raise Opal alone.

Now a teenager and still heartbroken over the abandonment of the mother she never knew, Opal must journey into her own past to reveal the generations of secrets that gave rise to the shimmering source of her family's painful legacy.

From the forests of Santa Cruz, to the 1980s glam of Melrose Avenue to a solitary mansion among the oil derricks off La Cienega Boulevard, and brimming with the double-edged capacity of memory to both heal and harm, Time’s Mouth is a poignant and evocative excavation of the bonds that bind families together.

Time, A Best Book of the Summer
Salon, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
Literary Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
The Millions, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
Library Journal, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year

"Lepucki’s latest novel is, in a word, a trip, narrated by Time itself . . . Lepucki is known for combining domestic realism with a magical worldview and/or SF–adjacent elements (here, there’s an isolation chamber in a box in the garage inspired by Reich’s Orgone Accumulator) and for evoking California in all its real, surreal, and unreal glory. She does it again. This emotionally intense, wildly imaginative novel is both down-to-earth and out-to-lunch. One of a kind."

—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"A time-travel story that feels shatteringly real . . . It's both gripping and moving, and promises at least one burst of cathartic tears."

—Lily Meyer, NPR

"An immersive, unique novel."

—The Boston Globe

"It is a story of motherhood and disjunction, of self-making and villainy, of a remarkable power depicted and deployed on an intimate scale . . . The novel is a page-turning exploration of the intergenerational trauma of this very specific family with its unique gift, and the ways each new generation tries to heal itself . . . One of California’s most anticipated books of the summer."

—Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times

"Investigating the past on a metaphysical scale, Lepucki calls into question the gifts inherited from previous generations, the durability of family attachments, and the love lost or found between children and mothers."

—Lou Fancher, East Bay Express

"An Edan Lepucki novel—any Edan Lepucki novel—is a treat. But this one involves a Californian woman who can time-travel through her own memories . . . I was sold on 'time-travel,' how about you?"

—Lauren Puckett-Pope, Elle

"Spanning decades and tracking the evolution of, and recovery from, intergenerational trauma, Time’s Mouth is a dreamy, heartfelt tearjerker."

—Arianna Rebolini, Bustle

"This moving portrait of three generations of a California family comes with a twist that literally kicks it into another dimension: Some characters can time-travel to earlier parts of their lives. Slipping these uncanny episodes seamlessly into a vivid portrait of life at a woodland women’s commune in the ’70s, and in a single-parent household in the ’90s, Lepucki traces the consequences of damaged mothering but gifts her characters—and readers—a deeply satisfying emotional finale."

—Oprah Daily