A surreal and dizzying journey through memory and grief

In the wake of her mother’s sudden death, a young, newly sober woman travels to Tbilisi, Georgia—a city suspended between past and present, empire and independence, superstition and modernity—to investigate the region’s intensely public mourning rituals.

There, she meets Sasha, a charismatic expat journalist from Russia who becomes her companion and guide through a disorienting labyrinth of decaying buildings filled with doppelgangers, silk moths, and an aluminum giant—the Mother of Georgia—who watches enigmatically over the city. Haunted by her memories, and longing for release, she wanders Tbilisi’s wine-filled streets, desperately searching for an alternative to the stifled, private mourning she experienced at home.

Lyrical, hallucinatory, and achingly precise, Giant Mother is a novel of grief rendered strange and luminous that takes its reader to a place where memory, myth, and desire collide in a startling reckoning with loss.