Promotion
Use code BESTBOOKS24 for 25% off sitewide + free shipping over $35
By clicking “Accept,” you agree to the use of cookies and similar technologies on your device as set forth in our Cookie Policy and our Privacy Policy. Please note that certain cookies are essential for this website to function properly and do not require user consent to be deployed.
In the Rhododendrons
A Memoir With Appearances by Virginia Woolf
Contributors
Read by Mia Hutchinson Shaw
Read by Heather Christle
Formats and Prices
Price
$24.99Format
Format:
- Audiobook Download (Unabridged) $24.99
- ebook $12.99 $16.99 CAD
- Hardcover $27.00 $35.00 CAD
Also available from:
When Heather Christle realizes that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite and intertwine each of their stories, in search of a more hopeful narrative and a future she can live with.
On a recent visit to London’s Kew Gardens, Christle’s mother revealed details of a painful story from her past that took place there, under circumstances that strangely paralleled Heather’s own sexual assault during a visit to London as a teenager.
Her private, British mother’s revelation—a rare burst of vulnerability in their strained relationship—propels Christle down a deep and destabilizing rabbit hole of investigation, as she both reads and wanders the streets of her mother’s past, peeling back the layers of family mythologies, England’s sanctioned historical narratives, and her own buried memories. Over the course of several trips to London, with and without her mother, she visits her family’s “birthday hill” in Kew Gardens, the now-public homes of the Bloomsbury set, the archives of the British Library, and the backyard garden where Woolf wrote her final sentence. All the while, she finds that Woolf and her writings not only constantly seem to connect and overlap with her mother’s story, but also that the author becomes a kind of vital intermediary: a sometimes confidante, sometimes mentor, sometimes distancing lens through which Christle can safely observe her mother and their experiences.
Wide-ranging and prismatic, the fruit of an insatiably curious, delightfully brilliant mind, In the Rhododendrons is part memoir, part biography of Virginia Woolf, part reckoning with the things we cannot change and the ways we can completely transform, if we dare. This utterly original book will stir readers into new ways of seeing their own lives.
-
"Christle’s exacting rigor and ferocious curiosity are matched only by the utter eccentricity of her vision, the delicious and frankly peerless freshness of her idiom: 'There is a difference between bones and a book,' she writes, 'but both have at their center a spine.' What results is irreducibly human. In the Rhododendrons is vital consolation. It’s a triumph, an instant classic. Christle has become one of our art’s most urgent living practitioners."Kaveh Akbar
-
“I first fell in love with Heather Christle’s writing in The Crying Book and her astonishing hybrid memoir, In the Rhododendrons, cements my devotion. In Christle’s narrative of discovery, of pilgrimages and portals, silence and reclamation, and the surprising bonds between a mother, a daughter, and Virginia Woolf, readers will experience a rare and wondrous mind at work. Heart-breaking, revelatory, exquisite, and ultimately ecstatic, this book is a gift.”Jessamine Chan, New York Times-bestselling author of The School for Good Mothers
- On Sale
- Apr 15, 2025
- Publisher
- Hachette Audio
- ISBN-13
- 9781668646182
You May Also Like
Newsletter Signup
By clicking ‘Sign Up,’ I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Hachette Book Group’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
