Coffee with a canine: Elizabeth Crane & Percy

Featured at Coffee with a Canine: Elizabeth Crane & Percival Fontaine Barskdale Brandt.

The author, on how she was united with Percy:

[H]e's a rescue, who we got through a friend who fostered Catahoulas. We weren't looking for a particular breed, and she had another foster (some kind of mountain dog-border collie mix? Big.) that we thought we might be interested in. But when she came to our house with that guy and Percy, Percy went straight for our sofa and curled up on it, and...[read on]

About Crane's latest novel, The History of Great Things, from the publisher:

A witty and irresistible story of a mother and daughter regarding each other through the looking glass of time, grief, and forgiveness.

In two beautifully counterpoised narratives, two women—mother and daughter—try to make sense of their own lives by revisiting what they know about each other. The History of Great Things tells the entwined stories of Lois, a daughter of the Depression Midwest who came to New York to transform herself into an opera star, and her daughter, Elizabeth, an aspiring writer who came of age in the 1970s and ’80s in the forbidding shadow of her often-absent, always larger-than-life mother. In a tour de force of storytelling and human empathy, Elizabeth chronicles the events of her mother’s life, and in turn Lois recounts her daughter’s story—pulling back the curtain on lifelong secrets, challenging and interrupting each other, defending their own behavior, brandishing or swallowing their pride, and, ultimately, coming to understand each other in a way that feels both extraordinary and universal.

The History of Great Things is a novel about a mother and daughter who are intimately connected and not connected enough; it will make readers laugh and cry and wonder how we become the adults we always knew we should—even if we’re not always adults our parents understand.

Learn more about The History of Great Things and its author at Elizabeth Crane's website.

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Coffee with a Canine: Elizabeth Crane & Percy.

--Marshal Zeringue