And Then She Fell: A Novel - Alicia Elliott
A Most Anticipated Book Pick by Toronto Star, CBC, The Walrus, Good Morning America, Bustle, CrimeReads, Electric Literature, Debutiful, Ms. Magazine, The Nerd Daily, and Paste
A mind-bending, gripping novel about Native life, motherhood and mental health that follows a young Mohawk woman who discovers that the picture-perfect life she always hoped for may have horrifying consequences
On the surface, Alice is exactly where she should be: She's just given birth to a beautiful baby girl, Dawn; her charming husband, Steve is nothing but supportive; and they've recently moved into a new home in a wealthy neighborhood in Toronto. But Alice could not feel like more of an imposter. She isn't connecting with Dawn, a struggle made even more difficult by the recent loss of her own mother, and every waking moment is spent hiding her despair from their white, watchful neighbors. Even when she does have a minute to herself, her perpetual self-doubt hinders theone vestige of her old life she has left: her goal of writing a modern retelling of the Haudenosaunee creation story.
At first, Alice is convinced her discomfort is of her own making. She has gotten everything she always dreamed of, after all. But then strange things start happening. She finds herself losing bits of time, hearing voices she can't explain, and speaking with things that should not be talking back to her, all while her neighbors' passive-aggressive behavior begins to morph into something far more threatening. Though Steve assures her this is all in her head, Alice cannot fight the feeling that something is very, very wrong, and that in her creation story lies the key to her and Dawn's survival. . . . She just has to finish it before it's too late.
Told in Alice's raw and darkly funny voice, And Then She Fell is an urgent and unflinching look at inherited trauma, womanhood, denial, and false allyship, which speeds to an unpredictable-and surreal-climax.
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ALICIA ELLIOTT is a Mohawk writer and editor living in Brantford, Ontario. She has written for The Globe and Mail, CBC, Hazlitt and many others. She's had numerous essays nominated for National Magazine Awards, winning Gold in 2017 and an honorable mention in 2020. Her short fiction was selected for Best American Short Stories 2018 (by Roxane Gay), Best Canadian Stories 2018 and Journey Prize Stories 30. Alicia was chosen by Tanya Talaga as the 2018 recipient of the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award. Her first book, A Mind Spread Out On The Ground, was a national bestseller in Canada. It was also nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction and won the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award.