ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sue Mell earned her MFA from Warren Wilson, and was a 2020 BookEnds fellow at SUNY Stony Brook. Her work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Hippocampus Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Cleaver Magazine, and elsewhere.  Her collection of micro essays, GIVING CARE, won the 2022 Chestnut Review Prose Chapbook Prize, and her story collection, A NEW DAY, was a finalist for the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award. PROVENANCE is her debut novel.

ABOUT THE BOOK - PROVENANCE - WINNER OF MADVILLE'S BLUE MOON NOVEL COMPETITION


Still grieving his wife's early death, DJ has spent the last three years-and the money from her insurance policy-collecting guitars, composing music, and continuing to shop the Brooklyn stoop sales and flea markets they'd always enjoyed. When his building is sold, he takes refuge in his younger sister's half-finished basement, imagining a comfortable and solitary retreat in Hurley, the small Hudson Valley town where they grew up. Instead, he finds himself caught up in her troubling divorce, drafted as caregiver for his 11-year-old niece, and unable to face or afford a storage unit crammed with hundreds of vinyl records and every other scrap of his former life. DJ gifts his niece a marbled glass egg, a porkpie hat, and one of his prized guitars. But what's asked of him, on his return to Hurley is not to give the perfect object-it's to give of himself.