Sight: A Novel

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018

'A dazzling obsessive entry in a burgeoning genre. Unusual and absorbing... the novel as a whole exudes a strange consoling power.' – The New Yorker

'Sight delves into a lot in under 200 pages: mothers and daughters, birth and death, loss and grief, finding one's balance, the ardor and arduousness of scientific discovery. Readers willing to give themselves over to Greengrass' penetrating vision will surely expand theirs.' – NPR

'With visceral, elegantly wrought truths of life and loss, this is an exciting companion to Sheila Heti's recent Motherhood (2018).' – Booklist


In Jessie Greengrass' dazzlingly brilliant debut novel, our unnamed narrator recounts her progress to motherhood, while remembering the death of her own mother ten years before, and the childhood summers she spent with her psychoanalyst grandmother.

Woven among these personal recollections are significant events in medical history: Wilhelm Rontgen’s discovery of the X-ray; Sigmund Freud’s development of psychoanalysis and the work that he did with his daughter, Anna; and the origins of modern surgery and the anatomy of pregnant bodies.

Sight is a novel about being a parent and a child: what it is like to bring a person in to the world, and what it is to let one go. Exquisitely written and fiercely intelligent, it is an incisive exploration of how we see others, and how we might know ourselves.