The Fates Will Find Their Way

(Paperback)

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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.

Reviews

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 *
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 *
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 *
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 *

Author Bio

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.