By Tatiana Țîbuleac
Translated by Monica Cure
From one of Moldova’s most celebrated writers, The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes is a complex coming-of-age story unraveling the fragile, complicated, redemptive relationship between a mother and her son.
Publication Date: January 27th, 2026
Hardcover: 9781646054091
Paperback: 9781646054619
eBook: 9781646054107
Available in Paperback: January 12th, 2027
Available in eBook: January 12th, 2027
Description
From one of Moldova’s most celebrated writers, The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes is a complex coming-of-age story unraveling the fragile, complicated, redemptive relationship between a mother and her son.
Aleksy still remembers the last summer he spent with his mother in Northern France. At eighteen, eager to fly the nest and escape a family still grief-stricken by the death of his sister years earlier, these lazy months in the countryside are akin to torture. And then, his mother tells him she’s dying.
Fourteen years later, at the urging of his psychiatrist, Aleksy relives the memory of the summer when everything changed, shaken once again by the emotions that besieged him when they arrived in that small French village. For fans of Claire Keegan and Elena Ferrante, this is a story of reconciliation, of three months in which mother and son finally lay down their weapons to make peace with each other and with themselves.
Biographical Information
Tatiana Țîbuleac is the award-winning Moldovan-Romanian author of The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes and The Glass Garden. She was born in Chișinău, Moldova, where she began her career as a journalist, working in print media and as a reporter and news anchor for PRO TV Chișinău, Moldova’s leading independent TV station. She also worked in Moldova for UNICEF before leaving for Paris, where she now lives. Her debut as a writer came in 2014 with a collection of short stories, followed by two novels that received multiple awards, including the 2019 European Union Prize for Literature for The Glass Garden. Her books have been translated into 17 languages.
Monica Cure is a Romanian-American writer, translator, and dialogue specialist, as well as a two-time Fulbright grant award winner. Her poetry and translations have been published in journals internationally, and she’s the author of the book Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century (University of Minnesota Press). Her translation of The Censor’s Notebook by Liliana Corobca (Seven Stories Press) was awarded with the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is currently based in Bucharest.
Reviews
“Brief and profound . . . Green Eyes is a beautiful novel, owing as much to the acuity of the dialogue and the strangeness of its metaphors (like the 'bloody sunflower field' whose stalks are 'popping out all the flowers row by row like a bunch of fish eyes') as to Tibuleac’s storytelling. Like a literary origamist, the author intricately folds in plot details so that each new revelation forces you to reconsider the shape of the whole narrative.” —The New York Times
“Țîbuleac offers a wryly tender exploration of grief, rage, and the fraught process of repairing a broken parent-child relationship. This slim but powerful novel will stay with readers.” —Publishers Weekly
“The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes is a season of ruptures—of immigrants in a third country, the fraught relationship between a mother and her mentally ill son, a body succumbing to illness, a family broken by loss. In Țîbuleac’s telling, these sites become the ground of profound transformation.” —Asymptote Magazine
“This is a portrait of the artist at once grandiose and abject—as pervert Christ locked in the tomb, fingering his wounds; with the viewer as voyeur at the keyhole—but Țîbuleac comes by it honestly and develops it convincingly.” —Cleveland Review of Books
“One of the most powerful and original explorations of a mother-child relationship in contemporary literature… a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling.” —The Kyiv Independent
“Tatiana Țîbuleac’s The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes is a gut-punch of a novel. Emotionally intense, unvarnished, and at times devastating, the narrator’s arresting voice draws the reader into the messiness of grief, love, and forgiveness, serving as stinging proof of just how much the human spirit can take.” —On the Seawall
“Any attempt to relive or change the past might be impossible, as Aleksy learns, but Țîbuleac’s novel shows that the effort of healing from it is not.” —Necessary Fiction
“Țîbuleac allows us to examine the fragility of human relationships through the specificity of the mother-son relationship . . . The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes is not an easy book, but maybe that’s the point. The book reflects on the fact that life is not easy. We each have our own set of challenges, and we struggle through them and make sense of them in our own way.” —World Literature Today