Long-listed for the 2016 International Dylan Thomas Prize
After two acclaimed story collections, Laura van den Berg brings us
Find Me, her highly anticipated debut novel--a gripping, imaginative,
darkly funny tale of a young woman struggling to find her place in the
world.
Joy has no one. She spends her days working the graveyard shift at a
grocery store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an
attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins
with memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, Joy, for the
first time in her life, seems to have an advantage: she is immune. When
Joy's immunity gains her admittance to a hospital in rural Kansas, she
sees a chance to escape her bleak existence. There she submits to
peculiar treatments and follows seemingly arbitrary rules, forming
cautious bonds with other patients--including her roommate, whom she
turns to in the night for comfort, and twin boys who are digging a
secret tunnel.
As winter descends, the hospital's fragile order breaks down and Joy
breaks free, embarking on a journey from Kansas to Florida, where she
believes she can find her birth mother, the woman who abandoned her as a
child. On the road in a devastated America, she encounters mysterious
companions, cities turned strange, and one very eerie house. As Joy
closes in on Florida, she must confront her own damaged memory and the
secrets she has been keeping from herself.
