Mystery / Literary Fiction
Date Published: September 30, 2021
Publisher: OTF Literary
What if your childhood harbored a dire warning about your future? What if your life and the lives of dozens of others, including your future child, depended on you deciphering that warning before it is too late?
Mother Blues is about the maternal relationships we never knew existed, the evil we never expect, and the redemption we never think possible. Subversively feminist and environmental, this is a novel about mothers: those we have loved and lost, those we have never known, and those who have always been there for us whether we have realized it or not. And while this is not a novel about blues music, the blues is everywhere in this story, both grounding it in history and pushing it forward in a slow, rhythmic ache.
If there is one maternal presence that binds together the characters of this novel, living and dead, it is the blues itself. Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Etta James, Big Mama Thornton, Mahalia Jackson, and all the timeless mothers to that quintessentially American genre are here, a soulful Greek chorus singing from the shadows, warning and imploring, offering hope, and bearing witness to lives adrift and in danger of capsizing.
Owen Thomas is a life-long Alaskan and avid reader. He has written five books: “The Lion Trees” (which has garnered over sixteen international book awards, including the Amazon Kindle Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Book and Author Book of the Year, the Beverly Hills International Book Award and, most recently, a finalist in the 2020 Book Excellence Awards); “Mother Blues,” (a novel of music and mystery set in post-Hurricane Harvey Texas); “Message in a Bullet: A Raymond Mackey Mystery,” (the first in a series of detective novels); “Signs of Passing” (a book of interconnected short stories, and winner of fourteen book awards, including the 2014 Pacific Book Awards for Short Fiction, also named one of the 100 Most Notable Books of 2015 by Shelf Unbound Magazine); and “This is the Dream,” (a collection of stories and novellas that explore that perplexing liminal distance between who we are and what we want). Owen maintains an active fiction and photography blog on Facebook, Tumblr and on his author website at www.owenthomasliterary.com.
For the ninth consecutive year since he has been measuring his commercial success as an author, Owen has not won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Also, to great acclaim, he has not won the Man Booker Prize. Most recently, in April of 2020, Owen was not nominated for a Pulitzer.
Owen makes his home in Alaska, Arizona and Hawaii. When he is not writing, Owen can be found recreating and taking photographs in the grandeur of these wonderfully picturesque locations. Some of these photos are posted on Owen’s photo blog, 1000 Words per Frame.
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