Brett is thrilled to be publishing her second novel, Epiphany’s Lament, with Regal House. The novel tells the story of British ex-pat Poppy Solomon, a piano refinisher and the daughter of a Kindertransport survivor. As the novel opens, Poppy discovers that her extended family owned an invaluable Velázquez painted in 1650. As the book moves through gritty 1990s East Village, New York, to an Abbey converted into a Vietnamese Refugee Center in Provincial England, alongside FBI Art Crime agent Maxwell Johnson she searches for the stunning portrait of an enslaved man looted during the Nazi genocide. Poppy, a confirmed bachelorette wary of connection due to the traumas at the heart of her family’s story, falls in love with Max against her desires. They scour through cobwebby tunnels, sift through interviews, testimonies, and found diaries, and crack open the walls of a studio in London. To find out who she is, Poppy grapples with the long generational reach of the past.
Brett wanted to write fiction ever since she was a small bookworm devouring everything in her path (appropriate and not appropriate literature), but first she had a career as an academic studying the aesthetics of Holocaust representation, Jewish literature, and how memory matters. Much this research wended into her fiction. The basis for her first novel, Rare Stuff, hit her like a tsunami and that same day she purchased a purple pen and a notebook recycled from other people’s packages, and began to spin a tale about a character playfully escorted into the salty sea on the slippery back of a friendly whale. That became the novel within the novel written by one of the main characters, Aaron Zimmerman. Set in the mid-90s, Rare Stuff tells the story of Sidney Zimmerman, a slightly lost white-Jewish photographer working on an infinite series of portraits of interracial couples. After the death of her father, novelist/rare book librarian Aaron, Sid and her Guadeloupean Melville scholar boyfriend follow a series of wacky clues Aaron irritatingly left in a suitcase to lead them to the solution of the mysterious disappearance of Sid’s whale-enthusiast mother eighteen years earlier. Aaron also left a manuscript, which was the catalyst for the whole text, set in an underwater universe and sporting his wild ideas that his wife had been adopted by whales. Rare Stuff takes readers on a multilayered, mysterious journey through a series of interlocking clues. An intriguing search for a missing person moves through real and magically real universes in New York, Chicago, and glass houses under the sea constructed by Yiddish-speaking whales desperate to save our endangered planet. The unusual story touches on grief, love, and precarity leavened with hope.
Brett was born and raised in New York City but spent time in California at the University of California, Santa Cruz and then received her Ph.D. from Berkeley. In between, she studied at Sussex, and lived in London and New York for several years, where she worked in publishing. She dreams of returning to New York, but enjoys the lively world of Champaign, Illinois, where she has felt at home since 2002. She lives with her husband, Philip Phillips, an opera-singing, tennis-playing theoretical physicist who she can only sometimes understand. They have three (combined) amazing children who are now adults. Brett’s father hails from a sprawling Jewish family and her great-grandfather was a rabbi. Her mother is English (from a Christian family), and her grandmother is Swiss; Brett spent each summer with her grandmother in a small English town that was quite a change from the Upper West Side! She loves her huge English family and some of her cousins are more like siblings. In the 1970s, she and her grandmother volunteered at a Vietnamese Refugee center near Stone, and this formed the kernel of Epiphany’s Lament.
