The story of Grace Brush’s struggle to find her own identity while growing up in a family of headstrong, eccentric, and powerful men, The Almanac Branch is Bradford Morrow’s second novel, marking a step away from the historical and epic sweep of Come Sunday toward a more psychological and Gothic investigation of a woman at the edge. Suffering from the excruciating pain of migraine headaches as a little girl, Grace conjures a hallucinatory life beyond the physical pain in her head and the psychic pain caused by her family.

 

Many branches fan out through this almanac of Grace’s days from youth to her current thirties. There is the limb of the tree where Grace’s dead brother, Desmond, lives; there is the nefarious branch of a dummy corporation that lies at the heart of her father’s extensive business conglomerate; there is the calendar of days and nights that, in its own branching, threatens to reveal a secret that could send the Brush family into ruin.

 

A portrait of devotion grown distorted, a sinister comedy about the ways in which our lives can mutate under the influence of jealousy and greed, The Almanac Branch is a moving tale of domestic tragedy and personal redemption.