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Named a Best Book of the Year by TIME • The New Yorker • ELLE • NPR • Harper’s Bazaar • Finalist 2024 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the 2024 Maya Angelou Book Award • Longlisted for 2025 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction • From the award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez—a masterful and unforgettable story of family, legacy, bloodlines, culture and inheritance, and what, if anything, we owe one another.
“Utterly consuming. . . . Fire Exit absolutely smolders.”—Tommy Orange
Does she remember this day? Does she remember it at all? Does she know this history—this story—her body holds secret from her?
From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine’s Penobscot Reservation. On the far bank, he caught brief moments of Roger and Mary raising their only child, Elizabeth—from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there’s always been something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from this family and the rest of the tribal community. It’s the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep.
Now it’s been weeks since he’s seen Elizabeth and Charles is worried. As he attempts to hold on and care for what he can: his home and property, his alcoholic, quick-tempered and big-hearted friend Bobby, and his mother, Louise, who is slipping ever-deeper into dementia—he becomes increasingly haunted by his past. Forced to confront a lost childhood on the reservation, a love affair cut short, and the death of his beloved stepfather, Fredrick, in a hunting accident—a death that he and Louise cannot agree where to lay the blame—Charles contends with questions he’s long been afraid to ask. Is it his secret to share? And would his daughter want to know the truth?
From award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez, Morgan Talty’s debut novel, Fire Exit, is a masterful and unforgettable story of family, legacy, bloodlines, culture and inheritance, and what, if anything, we owe one another.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 4, 2024 -
Formats
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781039056435
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781039056435
- File size: 2500 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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May 27, 2024
Talty follows up Night of the Living Rez with a moving if muted novel about a middle-aged white man yearning to tell his birth daughter, who was raised on the Penobscot Reservation, that he’s her father. Charles Lamosway grew up on the reservation, too, and lived there until 1983, when he turned 18 and had to leave because he had no blood ties to the tribe. His mother, Louise, was allowed to remain on the reservation with his Penobscot stepfather, who helped Charles build a house across the river, where he slipped into alcoholism. In 1991, Charles unexpectedly had a daughter with his Penobscot friend Mary. After she married a Penobscot man named Roger, the couple and Charles agreed to put Roger’s name on the birth certificate, so the girl, Elizabeth, could be a citizen of the tribe. Now, Charles, who’s been sober for more than 20 years, wonders if revealing the truth to Elizabeth might enrich her life and his own. The central tension—will Charles tell Elizabeth or won’t he—is set up early and doesn’t fully develop, but there are plenty of touching moments, such as a brief meeting between Charles and Elizabeth before she’s old enough to remember. This has the humanity of Talty’s promising debut, but it doesn’t quite reach the same heights. Agent: Rebecca Friedman, Rebecca Friedman Literary.
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