The New Moon's Arms

From award-winning author Nalo Hopkinson comes a triumphant and startlingly fresh novel of love, loss, and reclamation.

Calamity, originally christened Chastity, is confronting two of life's biggest dramas. First is the death of her father, a rigid, principled man who rejected a pregnant Calamity when she was sixteen years old. Contrary as the tides around her Caribbean island home and still angry about the indignities of the past, Calamity tended the old man in his last years, only to finally become the orphan she'd always felt like. The second drama: she's starting menopause. And with this change of life comes the return of a special gift she has not felt since her childhood—she can find lost things. Now after a little tingling in the hands and a hot flash, objects suddenly appear out of nowhere.

Then one morning a missing item washes up on the shore that is not her old toy truck or her hairbrush, but a bruised yet cheerful four-year-old boy, his ropy hair matted with shells. When Calamity decides to take the orphaned child into her care, she not only brings greater strain to her relationship with her now-adult daughter, but creates new unexpected upheaval in her life. For fostering this child will force Calamity to confront all the memories and mysteries of her own childhood and the disappearance of her mother so many years before.

In Calamity, Nalo Hopkinson has created an unswervingly honest portrait of a woman who discovers in her middle years that there is still more room to grow.