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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
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TELL ME WHO WE WERE

Kate McQuade

A linked collection that tells the story of six girls as they turn into women over the course of fifty years, starting when they're twelve.
At the book's opening, the girls are all at boarding school together when their beloved, young teacher and object of much fantasy and fascination, Mr. Arcilla, dies mysteriously at the bottom of the school lake. Each subsequent story is about one of the girls at a certain point along their journey, showing the effects of that tragedy on their lives. The themes are metamorphoses and womanhood, but the heart of the book is how an early loss can reverberate throughout the lives of those left behind, sometimes to destructive ends, and sometimes to restorative, even magical, ones. Kate's writing is lush, lyrical, and incisive, with sentences and paragraphs you want to cut out and pin to the wall and read over and over again. It's the kind of of-the-moment writing and storytelling that has propelled books like Emma Cline's The Girls to the tops of bestsellers lists.

Kate McQuade lives in Andover, Massachusetts. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Harvard Review, Baltimore Review, and Verse Daily, among other journals. In 2017, she was named a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference and awarded fellowships at Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has previously received awards and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, and the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars. A native Minnesotan, she holds degrees from Princeton University and the Bread Loaf School of English and teaches at Phillips Academy, Andover, where she holds the Harkness Instructorship in English.
Available products
Book

Published 2019-07-02 by William Morrow

Book

Published 2019-07-02 by William Morrow

Comments

These are stories of magical lyricism, contemporary in their exploration of the obsessions of girls and young women, mythic in their scope and mystery..Remarkable. The work of an exceptional writer.

With exquisite imagery and lush prose, TELL ME WHO WE WERE examines trauma, loss and the inexplicability of time's passage through a series of linked stories that, despite heartbreak, reveal how deeply interconnected we all are. Kate McQuade is one of the most exciting writers I've read in years. I could read and learn from her prose all day and still want more, and the haunting, crackling-with-life world of this linked collection will long stay with me.

FR: Seuil

Kate McQuade's TELL ME WHO WE WERE is the most refreshing work of contemporary literature I've read in years. The writing is dazzling, the characters are both dear and edgy (which makes them irresistible), and the author's courageous willingness to enter the most intimate human experience charges every page with brave news, pleasure, and illumination. The roots of this book are in ancient literature, but its spirit is stirringly Twenty-first Century. A virtuoso performance!

As I read TELL ME WHO WE WERE, I wanted to drown in its pages. I adored this remarkable, wonderful book of linked stories, held together by a mysterious death. The stories capture the longing of girlhood, the strangeness of motherhood, the pain and hopefulness felt in a marriage. Kate McQuade writes with beauty, grace, and an electric touch of magic.

A lush dark fairy tale forest of a book--full of shadowy life, magical upendings, and all the longings and betrayals of the body. So deeply felt and evocative that we live these stories inside the characters' skins. A moving, richly textured exploration of what it means to be haunted.

The stories in TELL ME WHO WE WERE are united by ferociously complicated women wrestling with pain and desire in a vividly unsettled world. Kate McQuade is a spectacular writer, equal parts sensitive and fearless, and The Translator's Daughter is abundant with heartbreak and wonder.