From the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection The Empathy Exams and the
memoir The Recovering Leslie Jamison's exquisitely beautiful (San Francisco Chronicle) novel
about three generations of women and the inescapable brutality of love. As a young woman Tilly
flees home for the hollow underworld of Nevada looking for pure souls and finding nothing but
bad habits. One day after Tilly has spent nearly thirty years without a family drinking
herself to the brink of death her niece Stella-who has been leading her own life of empty
promise in New York City-arrives on the doorstep of Tilly's desert trailer. The Gin Closet
unravels the strange and powerful intimacy that forms between them. With an uncanny ear for
dialogue and a witty unflinching candor about sex love and power Leslie Jamison reminds us
that no matter how unexpected its turns the life we're given is all we have: the cruelties
that unhinge us the beauties that clarify us the addictions that deform us those fleeting
possibilities of grace that fade as quickly as they come. The Gin Closet marks the debut of a
stunning new talent in fiction.
