When Silvia and her mother finally land in a place called Island City after being expelled
from their ancestral home in a not-too-distant future they end up living and working at The
Morningside a crumbling luxury tower where Silvia's aunt Ena serves as the superintendent.
Silvia feels unmoored in her new life because her mother has been so diligently secretive about
their family's past. Silvia knows almost nothing about the place she was born and spent her
early years nor does she know why she and her mother had to leave. But in Ena there is an
opening: a person willing to give a young girl glimpses into the folktales of her demolished
homeland a place of natural beauty and communal spirit that is lacking in Silvia's lonely and
impoverished reality. Enchanted by Ena's stories Silvia begins seeing the world with magical
possibilities and becomes obsessed with the mysterious older woman who lives in the penthouse
of the Morningside. Bezi Duras is an enigma to everyone in the building she has her own
elevator entrance and only leaves to go out at night and walk her three massive hounds often
not returning until the early morning. Silvia's mission to unravel the truth about this woman's
life and her own haunted past may end up costing her everything. Startling inventive and
profoundly moving THE MORNINGSIDE is a novel about the stories we tell and the stories we
refuse to tell to make sense of where we came from and who we hope we might become.
