Time’s Mouth

Ursa possesses a very special gift. She can travel through memory and revisit her past. After she flees her hometown for the counterculture glory of 1950s California, the intoxicating potential of her unique ability eventually draws a group of women into her orbit and into a mansion in the woods outside Santa Cruz. Yet Ursa’s powers come with a cost. Soon this cultish community of sisterhood takes an ominous turn, prompting her son, Ray, and his pregnant lover, Cherry, to flee to Los Angeles and reinvent themselves far from Ursa’s insidious influence. But escaping their past won’t be so easy when a series of mysterious events forces Cherry to abandon their baby, leaving Ray to raise Opal alone. 

Now a teenager and still heartbroken over the abandonment of the mother she never knew, Opal must journey into her own past to reveal the generations of secrets that gave rise to the shimmering source of her family’s painful legacy. 

From the forests of Santa Cruz to the 1980s glam of Melrose Avenue to a solitary estate among the oil derricks off La Cienega Boulevard,Time’s Mouth is an enthralling saga about family secrets that grow more powerful with time, set against the magical, dangerous landscape of California.

Praise

Book of the Week, People Magazine
A Most Anticipated Book of the Year, Literary Hub and Elle Magazine
Books We’re Looking Forward to in 2023, Salon
What to Read in 2023, Library Journal
New Books You Need to Read this Summer, Time
Best Beach Reads of 2023, Bustle
Summer Books Our Critics Are Excited About, NPR
Best Summer Books of 2023, Boston Globe
52 Books for Summer, Chicago Tribune
24 Works of Fiction to Read this Summer, New York Times
The Best Summer Books, Science Friday

“Rich and riveting.”

-People Magazine, Book of the Week

“An emotionally visceral, page-turning saga exploring motherhood, abandonment, self-invention, intergenerational trauma, cult worship, somatic therapy, and, most of all, the poignancy that even reconjured memories are forever lost once the present vanishes.”

-Jessica Zack, San Francisco Chronicle 

“This emotionally intense, wildly imaginative novel is both down-to-earth and out-to-lunch. One of a kind.”

-Kirkus Review, starred review

"Investigating the past on a metaphysical scale, Lepucki calls into question the gifts inherited from previous generations, the durability of family attachments, and the love lost or found between children and mothers."

—Lou Fancher, East Bay Express

“A shimmering novel, tackling some tricky questions about loneliness and self, power and love, memory and, of course, time.”

-Sarah Rachel Endelman, BookReporter

“Time’s Mouth only sounds corny if you have never read Edan Lepucki. Time itself narrates, then the story slides, touchingly, through generations of women in a family nursing pain — but also shouldering an ability to time travel into their pasts. Think less sci-fi than magic realism.”

—Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune

"A gripping intergenerational family saga with a slight fantastical bent, this asks big questions about motherhood, time, and how we can ever appreciate right now while it’s still here."

—theSkimm

“It is a story of motherhood and disjunction, of self-making and villainy, of a remarkable power depicted and deployed on an intimate scale . . . The novel is a page-turning exploration of the intergenerational trauma of this very specific family with its unique gift, and the ways each new generation tries to heal itself . . . One of California’s most anticipated books of the summer.”

—Carolyn Kellogg, The Los Angeles Times

“Like all Lepucki's work, it's both gripping and moving, and promises at least one burst of cathartic tears.”

-Lily Meyer, NPR

"Lepucki's prose is tactile, sensual, nimble—precise and full of pleasures. Time’s Mouth is an engrossing novel and a sprawling work of imagination."

—Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown

“Stunningly original and deeply human, Time’s Mouth is one of those books that’s impossible not to love. It’s a little magical, a little emotional, but most of all a meditation on loss and longing and the search for meaning in an inexplicable universe. I’m an Edan Lepucki fan, and this is her best book yet.”

—Janelle Brown, author of I’ll Be You

“Edan Lepucki's engrossing third novel tackles so much about the physical and psychic terrain of California, with its hippies and hipsters, its oil derricks and redwoods. It’s a beautiful book about a much-mythologized place, but its heart lives much closer to home: in the real and complex bond between parent and child.”

—Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind