Published in 2019
304 pages
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is an American and British novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She received her BA from Columbia University and her MFA from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first novel Harmless Like You was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and an NPR Great Read. In the UK it won the Author’s Club First Novel Award, a Betty Trask award, and was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize. Her work has appeared in Granta, Guernica, the Guardian, and the Paris Review, among other places.
What is this book about?
Mina is staring over the edge of the George Washington Bridge when a patrol car drives up. She tries to convince the officers she’s not about to jump but they don’t believe her. Her husband, Oscar is called to pick her up.
Oscar hopes that leaving New York for a few months will give Mina the space to heal. They travel to London, to an apartment wall-papered with indigo-eyed birds, to Oscar’s oldest friends, to a canal and blooming flower market. Mina, a classicist, searches for solutions to her failing mental health using mythological women. But she finds a beam of light in a living woman. Friendship and attraction blossom until Oscar and Mina’s complicated love is tested.
