Coming April 2026
Listen to Julie Esther Fisher read an excerpt from her novel, A Pearl is Just an Accident.
A Pearl is Just an Accident
In this haunting collection of interconnected stories, Eliza James confronts the treacherous legacy of family secrets and childhood trauma. From her work as a paintings conservator—someone who restores damaged art to its original beauty—to the fractured memories of her London upbringing, Eliza's journey reveals how the past refuses to stay buried.
Whether she's uncovering hidden scars beneath centuries-old portraits or wrestling with the devastating relationship between her parents, Eliza discovers that some damage runs too deep for any restoration. Through exquisite prose that moves across the Atlantic—from London flats to art studios, from family dining rooms to a brief refuge in the Scottish Highlands—author Julie Esther Fisher crafts an unflinching portrait of survival and the weight of inherited pain, touched with wry humor.
The collection's title story explores how we transform life's most unwanted intrusions—like the irritant that becomes a pearl through layers of protective nacre. Fisher excavates the buried archaeology of trauma with unflinching precision, revealing how damage can calcify into something harder, stranger, and unexpectedly luminous. With the meticulous eye of a master restorer and the sensibility of a poet, she maps the territory where beauty and brutality intersect, where survival becomes its own form of art.
A Pearl Is Just an Accident is a devastating examination of how we inherit damage from those meant to protect us, and how we might—against all odds—transform that legacy into something we can bear. These stories illuminate the slow, necessary work of building protective layers around our deepest wounds, creating something that might even shine.
Julie Esther Fisher
About Julie
London-raised Julie Esther Fisher has published stories and poetry in Alaska Quarterly Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Waxwing, The Citron Review, On the Seawall, and many other places. Winner of several awards, including Grand Prize Recipient of the Stories That Need to be Told Anthology, and Sunspot Lit’s Rigel Award, she has been shortlisted in numerous other contests and received multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart nominations. Her poetry chapbook, On the Lip of Night, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. A grateful recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, she is privileged to live today on acres of pristine wilderness in the western part of the state, where she designs garden and draws endless inspiration from nature.
The nine interconnected stories in A Pearl Is Just an Accident explore the breaches of connection and identity through the eyes of an American family living in both the US and the UK. Cultural and personal dislocations entwine with redemptive acts of love and rebellion. With a lyrical and deeply human approach, the stories pry open from the chest of secrets old wounds, counterbalancing these with the forces that heal: art, nature, and the redemptive power of abiding connection. Written through the eyes of characters who find refuge in the odd, the obsessive, in magic and beauty, A Pearl Is Just an Accident journeys into the world—at times the underworld—of family, trauma, grief, and recovery. Art Conservator, daughter, sister: with lyricism, even humor, Fisher probes the nuances of these roles, evoking their sometimes silent, sometimes clamorous ruptures, their singular hauntings and simmering legacies. She wrote A Pearl Is Just an Accident to put to good use trauma’s rich legacy in the hopes of moving readers and helping them feel less alone in the world.
Learn more about Julie at https://www.julieestherfisher.com.