Synopses & Reviews
The spirited, heart-driven people who populate these stories find surprising pockets of hope as they scrabble for ways to believe in themselves and the world. A woman returns to the Alaskan cabin of her survivalist childhood, full of misgivings and memories. A trip to Yellowstone sparks a crisis for a man who feels kinship with the wolves he glimpses there. Nursing painful pasts, sisters take a cruise together to Antarctica. A runaway finds salvation from violence in her own singing. And in the title novella, a Grand Canyon rafting expedition profoundly changes the lives of six women.
Review
“These tales of kick-ass women adventurers and survivor girls are big-hearted, breathtaking and profound. Reading Lava Falls is like meeting an animal in the wild: I was rapt, unable to turn away, with no idea what would happen next.” Micah Perks, What Becomes Us
Review
"This novella and group of stories by Lucy Jane Bledsoe will move and surprise and thrill you. Bledsoe brings us right into her characters' lives, taking us on unexpected journeys, and through it all the empowered and vulnerable women in Bledsoe's lively fictional world continually find themselves, so as readers we learn more about survival and are reminded of hope, and find ourselves being delightfully renewed.” Allen Gee, My Chinese-America
Review
"In these twelve remarkable stories, the reader journeys from the remotest inner reaches of Alaska to deceptively calm suburban neighborhoods to a research station at the bottom of the world. Yet Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s true territory is the wild, uncharted expanse of the heart. Lava Falls is a wise and wonderful collection." Kirstin Valdez Quade, Night at the Fiestas
About the Author
Lucy Jane Bledsoe's collection, Lava Falls, a novella and stories at the intersection of wilderness, family, and survival, is out this September 2018. Her most recent novel, The Evolution of Love, came out in May. She's the author of a previous collection of short stories, a collection of narrative nonfiction, and four other novels, including A Thin Bright Line and The Big Bang Symphony.
Her fiction has won a Yaddo Fellowship, the 2013 Saturday Evening Post Fiction Award, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, the Sherwood Anderson Prize for Fiction, a Pushcart nomination, a California Arts Council Fellowship, an American Library Association Stonewall Award, and two National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Fellowships. Her stories have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Chinese.