"My father proposed to my mother at gunpoint when she was nineteen, and knowing that she was already pregnant with a dead man's child, she accepted." Thus begins this spellbinding story of Elsie's journey toward understanding her late mother, a narcissist who left her only child an inheritance of debts and mysteries. A dancer in Los Angeles, Elsie was estranged from her mother for years. But now she's back in Toronto, trying to piece together the shards that remain of her mother's life. Meanwhile, she must cope with threats that come-or so she suspects-from The Seekers, the cult-like spiritual program to which her mother belonged. Undaunted, Elsie works to unravel the message her dying mother left for her, which ultimately takes her to the South African family homestead she never knew existed. A Refinery29 Best Book of 2017.