Felt is a novel about remembrance – what memories we cannot forget and what memories we lose — and the lengths to which we go to recover the forgotten and erase the unforgettable.
Matthew, a Toronto museum curator, returns home to New Brunswick to his mother who is wrestling with the challenges of living alone at age ninety-six. As mother and son face the prognosis of her developing Alzheimer’s disease, the pair begin to unfold a family saga marked by ingenuity, creativity, and resilience. Matthew pieces together the untold story, spanning three generations and two World Wars, of a Norwegian sardine-packer — his grandmother — who founded a handicraft empire in Loyalist territory. At the same time, his mother rearranges her past, her memory spinning and embroidering family history. A heart-rending and powerful story of three generations of a family in a small Maritime town in which shared and contested memories are woven, unraveled, and rewoven.
