The Mother of All Things

A Novel

By: Alexis Landau

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Jennifer Pickens

A daring novel from the acclaimed author of Those Who Are Saved: female rage, grief, and creativity collide in the present and animate the past, when a woman reconnects with her essential self during a summer journey, and discovers an ancient female world that offers parallels to her own

Kept busy by her obligations as a wife and mother, art history professor Ava Zaretsky has little time to devote to her research and writing. Now tagging along on her film-producer husband’s shoot in Bulgaria for the summer, where she’s mostly solo parenting her sweet son and rebellious budding tween daughter, she has a chance encounter with her fierce feminist mentor from college, which changes everything.

Ava is swept up into a circle of women who reenact ancient Greco-Roman mystery rites of initiation, bringing her research to life and illuminating the story of a 5th-century-BC mother-daughter pair whose sense of female loyalty to each other and connection to the divine feminine guides Ava in her exploration of the eternal stages of womanhood. Reaching across time and deep into the female psyche, The Mother of All Things delivers a revelatory tale of a woman coming to terms with her evolving sense of responsibility to herself and her family, as she achieves a new appreciation of the gifts of female wisdom and self-belief.

©2024 Alexis Landau (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Ambitious . . . specific, lush and transporting . . . The great success of this novel is the author’s sustained exploration of a woman in early midlife who . . . bravely re-evaluates how her life has unfolded in order to progress as a mother to herself. The sentences breathe with the softness of shared human experience across time.”—The New York Times

"The Mother of All Things glistens with passion, like wet paint. Alexis Landau has written a revelatory novel about the age-old disparity in power between men and women, focusing in on Ava, a wife and mother and stalled academic who feels a mixture of rage and bewilderment about the path her life has taken. Bursting with fresh insights into the merciless passage of time and the impossibility of protecting one’s children from the world's incursions, this novel is as original as it is accessible, written with a deft touch for the prosaic details of ordinary life as well as the seduction of mythic female narratives."—Daphne Merkin, author of This Close to Happy and Twenty-two Minutes of Unconditional Love

"A delicious fever dream of a novel about female rage and longing, Alexis Landau executes a high-wire act in The Mother of All Things, seamlessly weaving together ancient tragedies and contemporary dramas with dazzling results. Readers of Claire Messud and Rachel Yoder won’t be able to resist Landau’s sophisticated examination of ambition, desire, and anger." —Katy Hays, New York Times bestselling author of The Cloisters

Excellent book

Brings to life everything every mother feels. Casts light in to the inner workings of the minds of mothers.