Magnificence

… warm, moving, funny, earnest, hopeful, honest, and engaged in a way at odds with current literary fashion … Millet’s lush prose has you in her thrall from the start.
–Jenny Hendrix, Boston Globe

From the book jacket…

A woman embarks on a dazzling new phase in her life after inheriting a sprawling mansion and its vast collection of taxidermy.

Meet Susan Lindley, a woman adrift after her husband’s death and the dissolution of her family. Embarking on a new phase in her life after inheriting her uncle’s sprawling mansion and its vast collection of taxidermy, Susan decides to restore the neglected, moth-eaten animal mounts, tending to “the fur and feathers, the beaks, the bones and shimmering tails.” Meanwhile an equally derelict human menagerie — including an unfaithful husband and a chorus of eccentric old women — joins her in residence.

In a setting both wondrous and absurd, Susan defends her legacy from freeloading relatives and explores the mansion’s unknown spaces. Bringing Millet’s Los Angeles-based trilogy — How the Dead Dream and Ghost Lights — to a haunting crescendo, Magnificence explores evolution and extinction, children and parenthood, loss and revelation.