Hester in Sunlight

About Hester in Sunlight

Yes, that Hester — the fallen woman who bore the Scarlet Letter while raising her daughter on her own. She is looking back, across that clearing, and 150 years, at her fateful lover.
Less a re-telling or transposition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic than a re-purposing of the materials to tell a different version, Hester In Sunlight, revolving around the relationships between the (unnamed) narrator; her husband Sonny and gender fluid child Luna; her sister Dani and her two kids; and their parents, is a heady and stimulating riff on contemporary motherhood and parenting.
“The narrator in my novel has OCD,” novelist Hannah Calder says. “The book is an exploration of what OCD thinking can do to a classic, a meditation on what thought — often unwanted — can do in the gaps that naturally occur in literature.”