Tilt: Every Family Spins on Its Own Axis

Elizabeth Burns crafts a stunning debut novel, filled with luminous, wryly humorous and wrenchingly honest prose.
As a successful young urbanite, Bridget Fox experiences the typical joys and struggles of youthful New Yorkers, and she has happy expectations for her new family. But when her daughter Maeve is diagnosed with autism, Bridget’s life as she knew it and her idealistic images of the perfect family are shattered. She tries to lean on her husband, her father, her best friend, but none can help her reconstruct her world as other tragic challenges begin to surface. But as she tries to choose between insanity and oblivion, Bridget discovers that matters are not nearly so simple-or so hopeless-as she once believed.
Elizabeth Burns weaves the beauty and imagery of her poetic voice into a story of pain, humor, struggle and ultimate redemption. Bravely intimate, astonishing in its honesty, Tilt walks a path that most "normal" novels fear to tread as it follows the journey of a woman desperate enough to fall-and strong enough to survive.
"An inspiring symbol of hope and endurance."-Dan Wakefield, author of New York in the 50s
"This remarkable and poignantly particular first novel finds an ending, but its story will continue for as long as we, any of us, live and breathe."-Robert Creeley, author of Just In Time: Poems 19841994