Pull Me Under - Softcover

Luce, Kelly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1911547054 ISBN 13: 9781911547051

Publisher: Daunt Books, 2017

Synopsis

'Fierce and suspenseful... Written with precise and spectacular beauty.' Laura van den BergOn a cloudless afternoon in the peaceful Shikoku city of Tokushima, twelve-year-old Chizuru Akitani walked into the staff room at Motomachi Elementary, covered with blood and clutching a letter opener.Chizuru Akitani is the daughter of the famous violinist and Japanese Living National Treasure Hiro Akitani. Overweight and hafu (her mother is white), she is relentlessly tormented at school. When her mother dies suddenly and the cruelty at school only intensifies, Chizuru snaps in a moment of blind rage and fatally stabs a classmate in the neck.After seven years of institutionalisation, Chizuru flees Japan for a new life in the United States. She renames herself Rio, graduates from nursing school, marries and has a daughter, determined to keep her past a secret. But when a mysterious package arrives on her doorstep announcing the death of her father, she feels compelled to return to Japan for the first time in twenty years. Back in her homeland, long-kept secrets are suddenly unearthed and Rio's dark past is thrust back into her life.Full of sensual descriptions of Japan, its culture, and its language, Pull Me Under is a fierce and suspenseful exploration of home, identity, and the limits of forgiveness.'Phenomenal . . . captivates and disquiets in its search for answers about the parts of ourselves that are unknowable.' Electric Literature'Psychologically complex; inspires horror, sympathy and even, at times, humour.' Japan Times'Beautifully written and utterly hypnotic.' Bustle'Propulsive and fresh . . . Luce knows how to end her story, and does so satisfyingly.' Chicago Tribune

About this title

About the Author

Kelly Luce is the author of Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, which won Foreword Reviews' 2013 Editor's Choice Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for book prizes from the Texas Institute of Letters and the Writers' League of Texas. Her work has been honored by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, Jentel Arts, Tin House, and the Sewanee Writer's Conference, and has recently appeared in O, the Oprah Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Electric Literature, New England Review, American Short Fiction, and other publications. She was a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, where she received an MFA degree.

Review

''The writing of Kelly Luce is beautifully stark and simple, and at the same time playful, earthy, and violent. She's unique, a natural born writer, and Pull Me Under is a strange and very appealing novel, a journey to Japan and the primal scene of the main character's self -- which, like a volcano, may have already blown its top.'' --Rachel Kushner

''Kelly Luce's unforgettable debut is an elegant mystery, a tender story of family and forgiveness, an unsettling depiction of the darkness we each carry inside, and a hymn to Japan. Noodle shops, summer festivals, ancient temples, and the lush landscape of rural Shikoku burst to life in these pages. From its first sentence, Pull Me Under grabs the reader and doesn't let go.'' --Sarah Bird, author of Above the East China Sea

''As Rio moves deeper into the painful secrets of the past, secrets that nearly destroyed her in childhood and are threatening to undo her once again, I could not stop turning the pages of Kelly Luce's hypnotic debut. Pull Me Under is a fierce and suspenseful exploration of the profoundly mysterious nature of identity, written with precise and spectacular beauty. Kelly Luce is one of our most thrilling new talents.'' --Laura van den Berg

''Kelly Luce's debut novel is an urgent and wise story about the many disparate identities a life can hold, but it is also an astonishing example of all that a novel can encompass. By turns, Pull Me Under is a finely crafted mystery, a portrait of a fractured family, an evocative travelogue, an aching coming-of-age tale, and an insightful contemplation of our inescapable histories in an increasingly globalized and digitized culture. In this novel, Luce offers many poignant, page-turning pleasures, but her greatest gift to the reader is her revelation of how a single life, a single mind, a single, artful book can contain multitudes.'' --Stefan Merrill Block

''Kelly Luce makes a persuasive case for why she should be one of your favorite new short-story writers.'' --San Francisco Chronicle

''Luce has created a collection in which the donning of soft skins, naked or furred, is both an act of love and an expression of the unremitting strangeness of the self.'' --Chicago Tribune

"Kelly Luce's stories render memorably and with deadpan understatement their protagonists' obsessive combinations of longing and grief and bafflement in the face of their loved ones' emotional requirements, even as their worlds slip seamlessly into the uncanny. These stories unsettle as much as they entertain.'' --Jim Shepard

''Kelly Luce writes stories whose charm is a lasting effect. Her work is witty, unpredictable, and freshly written. There's a genuine imagination at work here that is a delight to spend time with.'' --Stuart Dybek

''In Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, Kelly Luce manages the impossible: each story delicate and enormous, intricate, glitteringly beautiful, never less than strange, never less than profound, ten spiderwebs astonishingly spun. Readers: here is your new favorite short story writer.'' --Elizabeth McCracken

''Luce deftly evokes Japan without exoticizing it . . . The final act is the novel's strongest and most confident, weaving the book's threads together and leaving a lasting reverberation.'' --Publishers Weekly

''Luce's debut novel is psychologically seductive, and the prose draws the reader into its loneliness. Pull Me Under shines brightest as an inquest into whether a split psyche can ever be made whole once the past becomes its own foreign country -- and the tyranny of being taught that a dark past is not to be trespassed upon.'' --Amy Jo Burns, Ploughshares (''The Most Necessary Books for the End of 2016'')

About this edition

• Publisher: Daunt Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1911547054
• ISBN 13: 9781911547051
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 278