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TRUE STORY

Kate Reed Petty

Inventive, electrifying and daring, TRUE STORY is a novel like nothing you've ever read before
After a college party, two boys drive a girl home: drunk and passed out in the back seat. Rumors spread about what they did to her, but later they'll tell the police a different version of events. Alice will never remember what truly happened. Her fracture runs deep, hidden beneath cleverness and wry humor. Nick - a sensitive, misguided boy who stood by - will never forget. That's just the beginning of this extraordinary journey into memory, fear and self-portrayal. Through university applications, a terrifying abusive relationship, a fateful reckoning with addiction and a final mind-bending twist, Alice and Nick will take on different roles to each other - some real, some invented - until finally, brought face to face once again, the secret of that night is revealed. Startlingly relevant and enthralling in its brilliance, TRUE STORY is by turns a campus novel, psychological thriller, horror story and crime noir, each narrative frame stripping away the fictions we tell about women, men and the very nature of truth. It introduces Kate Reed Petty as a provocative new voice in contemporary fiction. Kate lives in Baltimore, Maryland. She's been recognized with a Narrative Magazine "30 Below" Award, and a 2017 Rubys Artist Project Grant. Her short fiction has been published or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Blackbird, Ambit, Nat. Brut., and her nonfiction in LA Review of Books. She's the author, with artist Boya Sun, of a children's graphic novel, CHASMA KNIGHTS, just published by First Second. Kate has had residencies at Bloedel Reserve and The Mount, and has a Master of Letters from the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
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Published 2020-08-04 by Viking

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TRUE STORY is named one of the hottest books of the summer by Entertainment Weekly and BuzzFeed

Kate Reed Petty is such a gifted writer that she can make even a college application essay feel utterly heartbreaking. And in TRUE STORY she has given us a riveting and totally innovative novel about the power of lies to shape the truth, a book built like an elaborate jigsaw puzzle whose picture becomes thrillingly clear only after you've locked in the very last piece.

Spellbinding... Horror, suspense, confessional, epistolary tale, recovery memoir, cautionary tale, even, late in the novel, paranoiac noir - Petty leaps from genre to genre with dizzying velocity... we begin to see how she's using shifting genres to show the way trauma works on us, how it shapes our lived experience and the way we frame that experience for others and for our own survival. Read more...

[An] innovative, genre-busting debut... Themes of friendship, abuse, reality, and trauma resonate in this puzzle box of a book, and readers will be unable to put it down until they figure it out.

TRUE STORY is a spectacular first novel -- innovative, convincing, daring, suspenseful, heart-wrenching, and altogether astonishing. Kate Reed Petty is a force. What a beautifully unified, richly imagined, and skillfully composed work of literary art. I hope it wins the prizes Petty deserves.

Unfolds like a mystery, flitting between genres to weave an inventive tale. We slowly learn what really happened that night, but it's the ingenuity of Petty's genre bending that keeps you hooked until the very end.

I literally cannot believe this book exists. A mind-blowing page-turning un-put-downable heartwarming empathetic formally inventive horror suspense thriller, with a life-affirming and timely feminist message? What? This would be an amazing fifteenth novel for a person to have written and it is Kate Reed Petty's first one. What an incredible talent!

Video that Kate Reed Petty created for her London publisher riverrun to explain TRUE STORY Read more...

TRUE STORY is Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

...a sly commentary on the nature of trauma and the question of agency when telling a story. Like any good horror romp, this one has a delicious twist (and even a terrifying bout with a chainsaw). Ultimately, however, the true terrors come from withinour own demons, our own memories, our own dissonance between fiction and reality.

Brilliant - a darkly gripping enigma of a book. Petty boldly plays with genre and voice to tell the story of an assault and a rumor that shapes the trajectory of a woman's life. The result is a beautifully prismatic and profound meditation on victims and perpetrators, lies and truth, and above all the dangers and powers of storytelling and what it means to finally claim your voice.

Captivating... Petty's page-turner is as sly and devastating as the nature of truth.

UK: Riverrun/Quercus ; France: Gallmeister ; Spain: Alianza ; Catalan: Grup 62

a gripping, ripped-from-headlines tale.

Anyone who liked the formal invention of A Visit from the Goon Squad or Trust Exercise is gonna love this book.

Web Exclusive Interview Read more...