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  • Published: 1 April 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409021780
  • Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

The Fates Will Find Their Way





An extraordinary debut novel - The Virgin Suicides for a new generation

Sixteen-year-old Nora Lindell is missing. And the neighbourhood boys she's left behind are caught forever in the heady current of her absence.

As the days and years pile up, the mystery of her disappearance grows kaleidoscopically. A collection of rumours, divergent suspicions, and tantalising what-ifs, Nora Lindell's story is a shadowy projection of teenage lust, friendship, reverence, and regret, captured magically in the voice of the boys who still long for her.

Far more eager to imagine Nora's fate than to scrutinise their own, the boys sleepwalk into an adulthood of jobs, marriages, families, homes and daughters of their own, all the while pining for a girl - and a life - that no longer exists, except in the imagination.

  • Published: 1 April 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409021780
  • Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

About the author

Hannah Pittard

Hannah Pittard's fiction has appeared in McSweeney's, the Oxford American, the Mississippi Review, BOMB, Nimrod, and StoryQuarterly, and was included in 2008 Best American Short Stories' 100 Distinguished Stories. She is the recipient of the 2006 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award and has taught fiction at the University of Virginia, where she was also a Henry Hoyns Fellow.

Praise for The Fates Will Find Their Way

THE FATES WILL FIND THEIR WAY is about the way our imaginations can carry us from a dispiriting selfishness to a nascent empathy, and the way we continue to inflict-or even just observe-pain until that empathy arrives.

Jim Shepard

One of the most impressive aspects of The Fates Will Find Their Way is how it summons up the elements of a suburban youth...Deeply felt...At its core it's about how children become adults.

New York Times Book Review

It's hard not to think of The Virgin Suicides when reading this novel...The tone is wistful, lustful, gossipy, guilty ... undoubtedly a writer to watch

Guardian

Impressive...A story about the dark matter of adolescent desire that pulls on the heart across decades...A Poignant testimony of male adolescence, steeped in nostalgia and regret...Chilling and touching. Pittard can be harrowingly wise about the melancholy process of growing up.

Washington Post

Forcibly reminiscent of Jeffrey Eugenides's hit The Virgin Suicides ... this deeply readable novel concerns itself with mysteries that are at once more mundane and more profound - innocence, longing, the winding journey to adulthood.

Daily Mail

Exceptional... a beautifully crafted portrait of men slipping almost imperceptibly from childhood to middle-age...Combining the wistfulness of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones with the formal daring of David Vann's Legend of a Suicide, it's hard to imagine a better debut this year.

Financial Times

Dreamlike...Unusual and compelling.

Grazia

A startling piece of work...Pittard powerfully evokes the intense contradictions of adolescence: the capacity to feel dread, boldness, vulnerability, nostalgia and desire in a single instant...It is an unflinching account of the dark undercurrents of youthful sexuality

Observer

A haunting debut with echoes of The Virgin Suicides...By turn dreamy, regretful and melancholy, the velvety prose explores "what if" territory, offering alternative endings for the missing girl.

Marie Claire