Overview

For three years, Alma Carlile has been switching daily between two lives in two distinct versions of Lexington, Kentucky. Unhappily married in one world and in love with someone else in the other, a pregnancy in both realities forces her to confront herself and her bifurcated life. She hatches a plan to end the back and forth. Will she get what she wants or become trapped forever in the world she longs to escape? Across the same timeline and in the same two worlds, Alma's one true friend and elder, Lucky Parnell, negotiates the complexities and desires of her own lives but without the vantage point of knowing herself across both. A successful restaurateur, she finds herself longing for physical and spiritual communion with another but worries age has put happiness beyond her reach. Love presents itself. Will her own fear and doubt keep her alone? Throughout it all, a Greek chorus (with a Kentucky bent) comments and gestures toward the wonder and strangeness of life, regardless of who is living it or what can truly be known. A criss-crossing story of memory, desire, chosen family, and epistemology, Two Hearts, Two Mouths explores the tensions between what women want, what we can get, and who we can count on.

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9798993529622

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Reviews

""I have long admired Reva Russell English's songwriting-if you're not familiar with her work with Italian Beaches and Small Batch, you have something big to look forward to. With Two Hearts, Two Mouths, I now know that she is an extraordinary novelist as well. Reva is a master of psychosomatic language, of the physics of feeling. This book is gorgeously philosophical, immersive, funny, searing, wildly inventive, capacious of intellect, deep of heart."" - Arwen Donahue, author of Landings: A Crooked Creek Farm Year ""In Two Hearts, Two Mouths Alma's worlds collide. This beautiful novel pulls you in with its rich language, to the point where you feel like you're right there experiencing Alma's two realities with her. English does a magnificent job of tethering the story in not one but two worlds, and through Alma's journey, we start to consider whether life is greener on the other side or whether we have any control at all over the stories our lives tell. "" Savannah Sipple, author of WWJD & Other Poems ""With Two Hearts, Two Mouths, Reva Russell English tells a tale of exceptional richness and insight. With Alma Carlisle, she has created a protagonist who feels as alive as her readers. She is a fully formed human-flawed, joyful, searching for meaning in her daily struggles-a remarkable creation."" - Willie Davis, author of Nightwolf and I Can Outdance Jesus

Author Information

Originally from the windswept plains of Kansas, Reva Russell English is a preacher's kid turned writer, farmer, and musician. She won the Betty Gabehart Prize for Fiction in 2018 and has been a finalist for the Thomas Wolfe fiction prize. Her short stories and essays can be found scattered throughout a handful of small, regional journals, and she has lived in green, sweet-smelling Kentucky since 2010. Two Hearts, Two Mouths is her first novel.

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