About Wait
A young woman reunites with her teenage sister in their childhood home on Nantucket Island after their mother disappears in this alluring coming-of-age novel from the acclaimed author of It Is Wood, It Is Stone.
Elise is out dancing the night before her college graduation when her younger sister, Sophie, calls to tell her that their mom is nowhere to be found. Elise leaves on the next flight back to her childhood home, Nantucket Island, for the first time in nearly four years.
The sisters soon learn that their mother was stopped by police on her way home from work and deported to São Paulo, Brazil. Intent on bringing her mother back, Elise stays and secures the same job she had in high school: monitoring endangered birds. Meanwhile, her best friend from college, Sheba—a gregarious socialite and heir to a famed children’s toy company—reveals that she has inherited her grandfather’s summer mansion on Nantucket. Elise’s worlds collide as she confronts the emotional and material conditions that have fractured her family, as well as the life in Brazil that her mother has had to leave behind.
Told with penetrating insight, humor, and unexpected tenderness, Wait is a story about a family swimming against the social currents that erode bonds: housing precarity, immigration systems, and inherited wealth. But it is also a story about love, wit, and sisterhood, and how two sisters cling to each other in the midst of cataclysmic change, all the while dreaming about a better future.
Press for Wait
“Wait movingly tackles serious issues in one of America’s premier vacation spots. It is a commendable accomplishment.”
—Heller McAlpin, NPR
“Gabriella Burnham knows … the Nantucket of undocumented immigrants and broken families … This tender novel allows us to rejoice when tiny windows of opportunities begin to open.”
—Imbolo Mbue, The New York Times Book Review
“I’ve not encountered any [beach read] that incorporates the genuine experiences of [locals and seasonal workers] as successfully as Gabriella Burnham does in her new novel … The result is summer fiction with a social consciousness … the kind of thoughtful coming-of-age story that I wish appeared more often.”
—The Boston Globe
“Wait is an empathetic and clear-eyed exploration of the everyday injustices that slowly erode friendships, families, and lives in America.”
—Vulture Magazine, The Best Books of 2024
Praise for Wait
“Wait is beautiful, heartfelt, and transcendent—a carefully crafted portrayal of motherhood, sisterhood, and friendship put to the ultimate test. I found myself caring deeply about these characters and wanting to know desperately what was going to happen to them next. Wait is also the best account of year-round Nantucket Island that I’ve ever read.”
—Nathaniel Philbrick, National Book Award–winning author of In the Heart of the Sea, Mayflower, and Travels with George
“Wait is a limpid and lovely, powerful and affecting novel of family ties, sisterhood’s tender mercies, and the material conditions that shape our lives. Gabriella Burnham has given us a novel to remember, one that takes us to Nantucket and beyond—and we should gladly go.”
—Sarah Thankam Mathews, National Book Award–nominated author of All This Could Be Different
“Wise and richly layered, Wait is on one level a tender coming-of-age story set on the beautiful beaches of Nantucket, and on another a powerful inquiry into who gets to lay claim to American soil and call it home. Burnham’s nuanced exploration of friendship and sisterhood, inherited wealth and housing insecurity, birthright and disenfranchisement will stay with me. I could not put this book down and continued to think about it long after I emerged from its propulsive pages.”
—Qian Julie Wang, author of Beautiful Country
“Imbued with hope and loss, Wait is a stunning examination of homecoming and familial devotion. Burnham’s prose is sensuous and exacting. She writes about sisterhood, daughterhood, and friendship with deep wisdom and exquisite precision.”
—Kayla Maiuri, author of Mother in the Dark
“Gabriella Burnham’s sophomore novel, Wait, simultaneously illuminates the precariousness of young womanhood and existing as an immigrant in the United States, while showing the resourcefulness and strength needed to survive. Burnham examines how this strength is derived, not from the individual alone but from their ties to their community: their sisters, mothers, friends, and neighbors. As I read this novel, I could almost feel the Nantucket sea breeze whipping against my face and, at other times, caressing me.”
—Daphne Palasi Andreades, author of Brown Girls
About It Is Wood, It Is Stone
Two women are drawn into a seductive web of power, displacement, sexuality, and other mysteries of the heart in this magnetic debut by a young Brazilian American author to watch.
With sharp, gorgeous prose, It Is Wood, It Is Stone takes place over the course of a year in São Paulo, Brazil, in which two women’s lives intersect.
Linda, an anxious and restless American, moves to São Paulo with her husband, Dennis, who has accepted a yearlong professorship. As Dennis submerges himself in his work, Linda finds herself unmoored and adrift, feeling increasingly disassociated from her own body. Linda’s unwavering and skilled maid, Marta, has more claim to Linda’s home than Linda can fathom. Marta, who is struggling to make sense of complicated history and its racial tensions, is exasperated by Linda’s instability. One day, Linda leaves home with a charismatic and beguiling artist, whom she joins on a fervent adventure that causes reverberations felt by everyone, and ultimately binds Marta and Linda in a profoundly human, and tender, way.
An exquisite debut novel by young Brazilian American author Gabriella Burnham, It Is Wood, It Is Stone is about women whose romantic and subversive entanglements reflect on class and colorism, sexuality, and complex, divisive histories.
Press for It Is Wood, It Is Stone
“[An] artful tapestry of a novel … This is a remarkable story of secrecy, discovery and self-expression, delivered by a skillful observer.”
—The New York Times
“One of the greatest draws of “It Is Wood, It Is Stone” is Burnham’s exquisite prose, making Linda’s shrewd observations lush and alive… brutal and unflinching.”
—USA Today
“Captivating … Burnham dazzles by exploring the overlapping circles of need and care though tensions of race, privilege, sexuality, history, and memory. Thanks to Burnham’s precise, vivid understanding of her characters, this stranger-comes-to-town novel has the feel of a thriller as it illuminates the obligations of emotional labor. Burnham pulls off an electrifying twist on domestic fiction.”
—Publisher’s Weekly (Starred Review, A Best Book of 2020)
“I’ll be honest: I would recommend this book based on the cover alone. Thankfully, the story inside is equally gorgeous … A lush depiction of privilege and power, sex and stability, It Is Wood, It Is Stone is an elegant arrival of a new talent.”
—Elle (One of the Most Anticipated New Books of Summer)
“Debut novelist Gabriella Burnham knocks it out of the park with a sharp, knotty novel about colorism and class in the heart of São Paulo.”
—Harper’s Bazaar (A Best Book of 2020)
Praise for It Is Wood, It Is Stone
“It Is Wood, It Is Stone is a fever dream of a book; absolutely captivating and wonderfully destabilizing. I could not put it down. It is about uprootedness, class and color, and sex. It is about women on the verge—of collapse, of escape, of self-knowledge—failing and flailing and propping one another up. It is a book about the limits of propriety and the boundlessness of grace. Burnham is a writer of such remarkable insight, it’s impossible to believe this is her debut.”
—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals
“An absorbing and remarkably assured debut, It Is Wood, It Is Stone marries taut, cinematic suspense with intimate, textured domestic realism. Hits a major refresh button on the genre of psychological thriller and gives us something immensely satisfying and new.”
—Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
“Intimate, unsparing, and compassionate, It Is Wood, It Is Stone is unlike anything I’ve read. It’s a portrait of a woman adrift, but more than that, it’s a reflection on race, class, and privilege, rendered in beautifully observed and textured prose that describes hazy internal weather with gimlet clarity. Gabriella Burnham writes with generosity—and with sympathy for human imperfection—and captures so well the pain, envy, and expectations in life that make up each of our pasts, and linger into our present.”
—Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin
Gabriella Burnham 