"Things I will never forget: my name, my made-up birthday The dark of the Hospital at night. My mother's face, when she was young. Things other people will forget: where they come from, how old they are, the faces of the people they love. The right words for bowl and sunshine What is a beginning and what is an end. Joy spends her days working the graveyard shift at a store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins with silver blisters and 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. At once a hauntingly beautiful portrayal of a dystopian future and a powerful exploration of loneliness."
About the Author
Laura van den Berg was raised in Florida. Her first collection of short stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Her second collection of stories, The Isle of Youth , received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Find Me is her first novel. She lives in the Boston area.
Industry Reviews
A beautiful and compelling read -- Ann Patchett
One of the most freakishly talented young writers at work today -- Karen Russell
pleasingly strange ... impressively original * The New York Times Book Review *
Original piece of dystopian fiction...disturbing and thought provoking... * Daily Mail *
a distinctive new voice...original...intoxicating * BBC *
Spellbinding. . . Find Me is crafted to be consumed in small sips, though with a novel so full of mystery and surprise, the temptation is to gulp... * O, The Oprah Magazine *
A fresh spin on apocalyptic stories, Find Me beautifully evaluates memory loss and the stories we tell ourselves * Huffington Post *
A timeless chronicle of self-discovery...unforgettable... * Time Out *
A haunting exploration of loneliness * Marie Claire *
Laura van den Berg is the best young writer in America -- Claire Cameron, author of The Bear * Salon *
[Laura's stories are ]... uniformly excellent - emotionally complex, very raw - but always with a mixture of pathos and humour that made me think of Lorrie Moore -- Dave Eggers
Sad, eerie, smart, cynical and heartbreaking -- Robin Wasserman
This elegiac debut novel ... lingers and aches in the memory * The Guardian *
A must read * Stylist Magazine *
This is a thoughtful, touching story about survival-about finding ways to heal and reasons to live. * People *
In understated prose, Laura creates Joy's distorted and strange world. As we enter into that fictional world, we see that it reflects, in many ways, the real world where we find ourselves today. And in Joy's loneliness and desire to connect, we recognize ourselves. * The Los Angeles Review of Books *
Marvellous * Vanity Fair *
hauntingly beautiful . . . Don't miss this remarkable book * Bustle *
steeped in the anxieties of our era * New York Times *
[a] brilliant and claustrophobic novel * VICE *
one to watch out for * The Independent *
A very impressive, must read for fans of STATION ELEVEN, so unsettling but subtle too. I loved FIND ME... -- Eva Dolan
a moving, and frequently funny, exploration of character and of trauma * Independent *
