Her Here
Description
"Spellbinding. . . . Wholly engrossing." --Washington Post
"Dennis is in possession of hypnotic narrative gifts and a ferocious intellect. With Her Here, she has claimed her place in the literary world." --Rebecca Makkai, author of Music for Wartime and The Great Believers
"In Her Here, Dennis has written a metaphysical investigation that is also a wonderfully personal account of a daughter coming to terms with the loss of her mother, and a mother coming to terms with the loss of her daughter. As Elena conjures Ella's last days, the richly imagined narrative moves back and forth between Paris and Thailand, carrying both characters and readers to a vivid and suspenseful conclusion." --Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy and The Boy in the Field
Elena, struggling with memory loss due to a trauma that has unmoored her sense of self, deserts graduate school and a long-term relationship to accept a bizarre proposition from an estranged family friend in Paris: she will search for a young woman, Ella, who went missing six years earlier in Thailand, by rewriting her journals. As she delves deeper into Ella's story, Elena begins to lose sight of her own identity and drift dangerously toward self-annihilation.
Her Here is an existential detective story with a shocking denouement that plumbs the creative and destructive powers of narrative itself.
An Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate and Cambridge Gates Scholar, Amanda Dennis teaches at the American University of Paris. Her Here is her first novel.
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About the Author
Born in Philadelphia, Amanda Dennis studied modern languages at Princeton and Cambridge Universities before earning her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was awarded a Whited Fellowship in creative writing. An avid traveler, she has lived in six countries, including Thailand, where she spent a year as a Princeton in Asia fellow. She has written about literature for the Los Angeles Review of Books and Guernica, and she is assistant professor of comparative literature and creative writing at the American University of Paris, where she is researching the influence of 20th-century French philosophy on the work of Samuel Beckett. Her Here is her first novel.
Reviews
Buzz Books by Publishers Lunch selection
Library Journal "Best Debut Novels" selection
"Spellbinding. . . . Wholly engrossing. . . . This hypnotic and deeply cerebral exploration is a seductive escape. Through Ella and Elena's efforts to reconstruct a sense of self--outside family, beyond academia and expectation--through language, Dennis confronts the various ways we try to understand ourselves and others." --Washington Post
"A young woman has disappeared, and her mother asks a dead friend's daughter to reconstruct the young woman's life from her diaries, in the hopes of stumbling on clues to where she may be. It's a premise that would be a stretch for any novelist, but in her experimental debut Amanda Dennis wields that stretch the way a candymaker pulls and thickens ropes of sugar on hooks." --Literary Hub
"Dennis's elegant yet propulsive debut becomes much more than a missing-persons search. . . . Elena's narrative-within-a-narrative nicely reveals the creative process, while Dennis's larger story confirms the value of living boldly." --Library Journal (starred review)
"Wrenching and revelatory." --Foreword Reviews (starred review)
"Dennis' sensory prose leads to a fascinating exploration of identity, grief, and time." --Kirkus Reviews
"Evocative and meditative, Her Here is a ghost story without a ghost, a marvel of incantatory wit. Dennis weaves a mesmerizing web around her subject, drawing the reader into an intricate, volatile mystery whose end is always and never within reach." --Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine and Intimations
"In Her Here, Dennis has written a metaphysical investigation that is also a wonderfully personal account of a daughter coming to terms with the loss of her mother, and a mother coming to terms with the loss of her daughter. As Elena conjures Ella's last days, the richly imagined narrative moves back and forth between Paris and Thailand, carrying both characters and readers to a vivid and suspenseful conclusion." --Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy and The Boy in the Field
"Dennis is in possession of hypnotic narrative gifts and a ferocious intellect. With Her Here, she has claimed her place in the literary world." --Rebecca Makkai, author of Music for Wartime and The Great Believers
"Dazzling. Dennis is a writer that awakens the senses. From the first page, this gorgeous, haunting story about two lost girls ensnares the reader with such expertise, such intelligence and heart, that before long you're lost inside the eerie sensuality of youthful dreams, witnessing obsession unravel identity." --Dina Nayeri, author of Refuge and The Ungrateful Refugee
