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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
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ONCE, IN LOURDES

Sharon Solwitz

ONCE, IN LOURDES is an extraordinary novel, set in the turbulent August of 1968, about the lives and friendships of four high school students who make a date for a suicide pact two weeks later, and what transpires in those two weeks.
The world of their friendship, their secrets, and the political and cultural forces of the turbulent 1960s, including the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, are rendered through the eyes and minds of each of the four as imagined by one of them, Kay Campion, whose father has remarried after her mother's suicide.

At the end, after a spate of unexpected joys, troubles, and catastrophes, the four stand where they had pledged to be, on the edge of the bluff. Each must choose between loyalty to their friendship and the compromises of adulthood. Reminiscent of novels about teenage lives and friendships like Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides and Donna Tartt's The Secret History, ONCE, IN LOURDES transports readers to the epicenter of their own teenage lives, where the intensity of friendship was paramount to all else.

Sharon Solwitz's literary prizes include a Pushcart Prize, the Dan Curley Award, the Tara Fellowship in Short Fiction (from the Heekin Foundation,) the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize, the Nelson Algren Prize (three times), the Hemingway Days Festival Prize, as well as awards and fellowships from the Kansas and Illinois Arts Councils. Her collection of stories Blood and Milk (Sarabande, 1997), won the Carl Sandburg Prize and the adult fiction award from the Society of Midland Authors, and was runner up for the National Jewish Book Award. She is also the author of Bloody Mary (Sarabande, 2003). Her short fiction has been published in numerous magazines including Ploughshares, The Chicago Tribune, Tikkun and Mademoiselle. Her short story “Alive” appeared in Best American Short Stories 2012. She is an associate professor English at Purdue University in W. Lafayette, Indiana, where she teaches fiction writing. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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Book

Published 2017-05-30 by Spiegel & Grau

Book

Published 2017-05-30 by Spiegel & Grau

Comments

After writing a spate of short stories, [Solwitz] returns to the longer form with a ravishing sense of place, electric eroticism, and a heightened, almost surreal, feel for how intense emotions alter our perception of the world, especially in youth. Solwitz’s surging, many-threaded, complexly insightful tale dramatizes not only personal crises, but also the violence of the infamous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Timely and timeless.

Culminating in a ... profound denouement...a tour de force examining the bonds of friendship and the adolescent state of mind. Expect to be taken to the brink more than once. Highly recommended.

[An] honest and soul-baring novel about choice, fate, and the consequences of youthful idealism…A dark novel that knowingly depicts the confusion of being a teenager and the strong bonds of friendship that form at that young age.