The glass ocean - Lori Baker

The Glass Ocean is a story of becoming. Flamehaired, six-foot-two in stocking feet, newly orphaned Carlotta Dell'oro recounts the lives of her parents - solitary glassmaker Leonardo Dell'oro and beautiful, unreachable Clotilde Girard - and discovers in their loves and losses, their omissions and obsessions, the circumstances of her abandonment and the weight of her inheritance. With a master artisan's patience and exquisite craft, debut novelist Lori Baker has created a gemlike Victorian world, a place where mistakes of the past reappear in the future, art can destroy, and family is not to be trusted.

Lori Baker is the author of Crash and Tell: Stories, Crazy Water: Six Fictions, which won the Mamdouha S. Bobst Literary Award for emerging writers, and Scraps. She has taught fiction writing, journalism, and composition at Brown University, Boston College, and Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. She lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.

An adventure of dreamlike momentum and romantic intensity, brought alive by a storyteller with uncanny access to the Victorians, not only to the closely-woven texture of their days but also to the dangerous nocturnal fires being attended to in their hearts
Thomas Pynchon

Dazzling . . . a haunting gem of a novel that subtly makes its mark. In The Glass Ocean, Baker has created a compelling, unforgettable version of Victorian England
Guardian