Author(s): Idra Novey

General Fiction

Take What You Need traces the parallel lives of Jean and her beloved but estranged stepdaughter, Leah, who's sought a clean break from her rural childhood. In Leah's urban life with her young family, she's revealed little about Jean, how much she misses her stepmother's hard-won insights and joyful lack of inhibition.
But with Jean's death, Leah must return to sort through what's been left be-hind. What Leah discovers is staggering: Jean has filled her ramshackle house with giant sculptures she's welded from scraps of the area's industrial history.

Set in the Allegheny Mountains of Appalachia, Take What You Need explores the continuing mystery of the people we love most, zeroing in on the joys and difficulties of family with great verve and humour.

Matilda Bookshop Review

I devoured this almost perfect book in one sitting. Told from the vividly realised perspectives of Jean and Leah, stepmother and stepdaughter respectively, Take What You Need transmutes uncomfortable subjects such as Trump’s America, economic precariousness and toxic masculinity into something compulsively readable. What makes the novel sing is the depiction of how art, in this case intricately layered metal sculptures, can transport us from the mundane to the sublime. Novey’s touch as an author is delicate, and it is seemingly only in retrospect that you come to understand the vaulting ambition of this wonderful novel. Gavin