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.

Mark Blagrave was born and raised in Ontario, and has lived in New Brunswick. His first novel, Silver Salts, was shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Novel and the 2009 Margaret and John Savage First Book Award (Atlantic Book Awards). His short stories have been published regularly in leading Canadian literary journals, including The New Quarterly and The Fiddlehead, and his plays have been produced professionally and in university theatres. Formerly a professor at Mount Allison University, Blagrave now lives in London, Ontario, where he is Dean of Arts and Social Sciences at Huron College.

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