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.

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.