Synopses & Reviews
Sixteen-year-old Nora Lindell is missing. And the neighborhood boys she left behind are caught forever in the heady current of her absence.
As the days and years pile up, the mystery of her disappearance grows kaleidoscopically. A collection of rumors, divergent suspicions, and tantalizing what ifs, Nora Lindell's story is a shadowy projection of teenage lust, friendship, reverence, and regret, captured magically in the disembodied plural voice of the boys who still long for her.
Told in haunting, percussive prose, Hannah Pittard's beautifully crafted story tracks the emotional progress of the sister Nora left behind, the other families in their leafy suburban enclave, and the individual fates of the boys in her thrall. Far more eager to imagine Nora's fate than to scrutinize their own, the boys sleepwalk into an adulthood of jobs, marriages, families, homes, and daughters of their own, all the while pining for a girl — and a life — that no longer exists, except in the imagination.
A masterful literary debut that shines a light into the dream-filled space between childhood and all that follows, The Fates Will Find Their Way is a story about the stories we tell ourselves — of who we once were and might someday become.
Review
"A debut novel sure to linger with readers...Though relatively brief, the novel has great depth, enhanced by Pittard’s precision of language. The result is a stimulating examination of loss, memory, history, and perception and how the past never leaves — indeed is the main factor in the present." Publishers Weekly, Galley Talk
Review
"The Fates Will Find Their Way is a bold, wise, magical, and authentic novel about youthful infatuation and its legacy. Hannah Pittard’s beautifully confident prose is sure to make readers look back on their own teenage years with fresh wonder." Vendela Vida
Synopsis
Reminiscent of The Virgin Suicides, an eerily evocative and masterfully crafted literary debut about a teenage girl who goes missing and the effect her disappearance has on the boys she grew up with
Synopsis
Pittard presents a masterfully crafted, haunting literary debut about a missing girl and the boys she grew up with who find themselves caught in the mysterious wake of her absence for the rest of their lives.
About the Author
Hannah Pittard’s fiction has appeared in McSweeney's, The Oxford American, The Mississippi Review, BOMB, Nimrod, StoryQuarterly, and was included in the 2008 Best American Short Stories' 100 Distinguished Stories. She is the recipient of the 2006 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, and has taught fiction at the University of Virginia, where she was also a Henry Hoyns Fellow.