If You Follow Me
"I love, love, love If You Follow Me. It's fearlessly honest, occasionally heartbreaking, and extremely funny, and I can't recommend it highly enough." -- Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times bestselling author of Prep and American Wife
In Malena Watrous' beautifully wrought and deftly written debut novel, we meet Marina, a young woman who has come to the small, rural Japanese town of Shika to teach English for a year. For her, Shika is more than just her home as a "temporary person." It's also an attempt to escape the reality that has followed her since her father committed suicide only a year earlier.
Marina is a big city girl is in a small town filled with off-beat characters, including an ambitious town matchmaker, a dentist looking for free English lessons, a high school student who idolizes Western rap artists, and finally Marina's America-obsessed supervisor, Hiro, a town leader whose friendship teaches her more than she ever expected.
If You Follow Me is at once a fish-out-of-water tale, a dark comedy of manners, and a strange kind of love story that explores the tension of being the outsider in an intimate community and the joy in finding that human nature is the same everywhere.
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Malena Watrous's short fiction has appeared in Story Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Triquarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and Kyoto Journal. The winner of the Michener-Copernicus Award, she lives in San Francisco.
"I love, love, love IF YOU FOLLOW ME. It's fearlessly honest, occasionally heartbreaking, and extremely funny, and I can't recommend it highly enough." -- Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times bestselling author of PREP and AMERICAN WIFE
"[A] deft, funny, and emotionally acute first novel...Watrous's book crackles with atmospheric detail and sharp dialogue, and tells a vivid story of an American confronting grief and self-knowledge in an unfamiliar place." -- Boston Globe
"Graceful, smart, and filled with wonder, If You Follow Me is a heartfelt delight from beginning to end." -- Michelle Richmond, bestselling author of The Year of Fog
"In this beautiful novel, what is most "foreign" to Marina turns out to be her complex relationships with those she thought she knew best. Malena Watrous's writing is sharp-edged and generous, tragic and true. I would follow her anywhere." -- Katharine Noel, author of Halfway House
"If You Follow Me is the kind of book you finish and then clutch to your heart as you run around telling everyone you know that they have to read it. Watrous has written a book of great genuine warmth, startling honesty, and remarkable power." -- Thisbe Nissen, author of Osprey Island
"This tragicomic debut novel spunky, feminist and perpetually wrong-footed college grad as she spends four seasons in rural Japan escaping the memory of her father's suicide." -- Ms. magazine
"[C]onfident and heartfelt, a finely sketched reminder of the ways in which new loves are like new countries....If You Follow Me will charm all readers who have ever fumbled, offended, raged, and had their hearts broken in a foreign land." -- San Francisco magazine
"A smart, comic first novel." -- New York Times Book Review
"Her writing is direct and conversational. And she is able to deliver an excruciating portrayal of Marina's internal struggles." -- Eugene Register-Guard
