Motherclown

A Novel

By: Harriet Alida Lye

Indigo’s Most Anticipated Books of 2026 • CBC Books Spring Fiction List 2026

A dual coming-of-age story about performance—both public and private—sexuality, envy, and grief. Motherclown explores the most fundamental and potentially explosive of human relationships: that of a mother and her daughter.

In the wake of her father’s death, twenty-one-year-old Elise leaves her boyfriend, mother, and hometown of Niagara Falls to move to Paris. She’s earned a place at Chevalier, an elite physical theatre school with a focus on clown. Not “clown-clown,” but the pursuit of an inner child. At Chevalier, they don’t follow scripts—they follow their souls. The school is merciless, and it is the best.

Left behind, Elise’s mother, Catherine, is unravelling. At first she feels irritated, as if she’s just been demoted: from wife to widow, mother to empty-nester. She longs for the creative life she lost when she became pregnant, and in the quiet of the empty house, she becomes haunted by regret, and a secret she never told her daughter. When Elise disappears into Paris, Catherine follows.

But Elise, awakening to her own creative power, feels ambushed by her mother’s arrival. As Paris works its spell on them both, old wounds surface and resentments ignite. Can Elise hear her mother without losing herself? Can Catherine face the real reason she followed her daughter to Paris, or is she there—as Elise believes—to swallow her daughter whole?

Motherclown is an electric novel about art and inheritance, desire and devotion, and the ferocious, vulnerable love between mothers and daughters.