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.

About the author

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.

Product details

• Authors: Malena Watrous, Watrous Malena
• Publisher: Harper Perennial USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 09.03.2010
• EAN: 9780061732850
• ISBN: 978-0-06-173285-0
• No. of pages: 384
• Dimensions: 136 mm x 204 mm x 27 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; FICTION: Women, FICTION: General, FICTION: Romance / Contemporary, FICTION: Thrillers / Suspense, FICTION: Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths, FICTION: Mystery & Detective / International Crime & Mystery, FICTION: Coming of Age, FICTION: Small Town & Rural *, FICTION: Humorous / Black Humor