Take What You Need

Take What You Need is a dual-voiced novel told by Leah, a translator and mother living in New York, and Jean, the abrasive, brilliant former stepmother Leah cut off years ago. After Jean dies in an accident, Leah returns to the collapsing Rust Belt town where Jean never left—and discovers Jean spent her final years building towering welded sculptures in her living room.

But Jean’s art is tangled with a volatile relationship she formed with Elliott, a young neighbor whose desperation and history with Leah collide in ways Leah can’t ignore. As Leah tries to decide what to do with Jean’s work—and what to believe about Jean’s last years—the story becomes a reckoning with complicated caregiving, class and rage, motherhood and abandonment, and the fierce, messy ways art can be both refuge and confession.

• Listeners who like emotionally intense, character-driven literary fiction about family estrangement, grief, and moral ambiguity.
• Readers drawn to novels about art-making as survival—especially later-in-life creative awakenings.
• Anyone interested in contemporary American stories set in post-industrial towns, where class pressure and social fracture shape every relationship.

Idra Novey is the award-winning author of the novels Ways to Disappear and Those Who Knew. Her work has been translated into numerous languages, and she has written for major outlets including The Atlantic and The New York Times. She teaches fiction at Princeton University and in the MFA Program at New York University.