Third Class Relics: A Novel

Forty-one-year-old Abra, the narrator of Third Class Relics, gathers with her brother and cousins for an uncomfortable dinner the night after her father’s wake. No one speaks of the one missing family member—Jeffrey, the youngest cousin—nor of his doppelganger, Rupert, whose name Abra’s father cried out just before his death. When the evening comes to a close, Abra finds herself prowling her family’s history against her will. As she journeys through their darkest chapters, she is forced to confront the complex role Jeffrey/Rupert played in both healing and destroying them all, as well as the significance of her relationship with her cousin Andrei, who has spent twenty years blaming himself for the family’s defining tragedy. Third Class Relics recalls many Biblical myths, stories in which one person must perish so that those around him might be awakened to their inner darkness but also to their capacity for redemption.

About the Author :
Elizabeth Genovise grew up in Villa Park, Illinois and earned her MFA in fiction at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She has been the recipient of an O. Henry prize among other honors and has published five collections of short stories: A Different Harbor, Where There Are Two or More, Posing Nude for the Saints, Palindrome, and Lighthouse Dreams, as well as a novella, The Numismatist. She teaches literature and writing near Knoxville, Tennessee.

Review :
"A portrait of brothers and sisters who turn against one of their own, Third Class Relics is a poignant novel whose characters traverse the full spectrum of emotions from fury to grief and at last to burgeoning joy."
--Kaye Park Hinckley, author of Birds of a Feather--Kaye Park Hinckley "I read Elizabeth Genovise's Third Class Relics with tears in my eyes all the way through. This book is so masterfully crafted that it is impossible not to feel the message that pounds like a heavy heartbeat in each line. This novel is a call to action, and that action is love. If only we could love others for who they are and not who we selfishly need them to be . . . It is imperative that we start now."
​--Amy Willoughby-Burle, author of Out Across the Nowhere--Amy Willoughby-Burle "With lyrical language that often reads like luminous incantations, Elizabeth Genovise crafts a saga of shattered children cleaving to one another in the shadow of broken parents, all salvaged by a savior unexpected and delightful. Here is a book sometimes quirky, often quite funny, but always profoundly insightful. It's a novel that belongs on that rare shelf alongside unmatched wonders like The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Housekeeping. Third Class Relics is tragically lovely, brutally true, miraculously devastating."
--Neil Connelly, author of In the Wake of Our Vows--Neil Connelly