Description

A TIME, The New Yorker, ELLE, NPR, Harpers Bazaar Best Book of the Year

Winner of the 2025 Housatonic Book Award

Finalist 2024 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the 2024 Maya Angelou Book Award

Shortlisted for the 2025 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award

Longlisted for the 2025 VCU Cabell First Novel Award, 2025 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

Utterly consuming. . . . Fire Exit absolutely Orange

From the award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez, comes a masterful and unforgettable story of family, legacy, bloodlines, culture and inheritance, and what, if anything, we owe one another.

From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maines Penobscot Reservation. He caught brief moments of his neighbor Elizabeths lifefrom the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But theres something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from her and the rest of the tribal community. Its the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep.

Now, its been weeks since hes seen Elizabeth, and Charles is worried. As he attempts to hold on to and care for what he canhis home and property; his alcoholic and bighearted friend Bobby; and his mother, Louise, who is slipping deeper into dementiahe becomes increasingly haunted by his past. Forced to confront a lost childhood on the reservation, a love affair cut short, and the death of his beloved stepfather, Fredrick, Charles contends with questions hes long been afraid to ask. Is his secret about Elizabeth his to share? And would his daughter want to know the truth, even if it could cost her everything shes ever known?

Author: Morgan Talty
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Tin House
Published: 01/27/2026
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.81lbs
ISBN: 9781963108491
Language: English