Picture of my proof copy
PUBLISHED PAPERBACK BY SCEPTRE 11TH JULY 2O19
Mina is staring over the edge of the George Washington Bridge when a patrol car drives up. She tries to convince the officers she’s not about to jump but they don’t believe her. Her husband, Oscar is called to pick her up.
Oscar hopes that leaving New York for a few months will give Mina space to heal. They travel to London, to an apartment wall papered with indigo eye birds, to meet Oscar’s oldest friends, to a canal and blooming flower market.
Mina a classicist, searchers for solutions to her failing mental health using mythological women but instead finds a beam of light in a living woman. While she explores what this means Oscar is called back to the US by his father and the distance between them forces them to decide what matters most.
August
She wasn’t expecting the bridge to shudder. It was too big for trembling. Cars hissed from New York to New Jersey over its wide back. That August had not been hot, 96 Fahrenheit hot. Heat softened the dollar bills and clung to the quarters and the dimes that passed from sticky hand to sticky hand.
It was the night and the air had cooled but humidity still hung in a red fog in Mina’s lungs. Wind galloped over the Hudson, pummelling the city with airy hooves. The bridge shifted, the pylons swayed, and Mina closed her eyes to better feel her bones judder. Even her teeth shook. The day’s sweat shivered between her bare shoulder blades. The tank felt too thin, and the down on her arms rose.
She took a step forward along the bridge. The tender spots between her big and index toes were sore from too many days in flip flops. She took the sandals off. They swung from her fingers as she walked. Under her feet, the rough cement was warm. She wondered about the people driving their shadowy cars. Were they leaving over air conditioned offices, or bars cooled by the thwack of ceiling fans? Where they going home to empty condos, or daughters tucked under dinosaur quilts?
The bridge was decked out in blue lights, like a Christmas tree, like those monochrome ones shopping malls put up. Still, it was beautiful. Mina readied her phone to take a picture. She watched the granulated night appear onscreen. Perhaps her hands wobbled, because the photo was a blur. It was nothing to send Oscar. But she wasn’t sure it was a good idea to send him pictures. Not tonight.
ABOUT AUTHOR ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN
Rowan Hisaya Buchanan’s first novel Harmless Like You won the Author’s Club First Novel Award, a Betty Trask award and was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliot prize. In the USA it was a New York Times Editors Choice and an NPR 2017 Great Read. Buchanan’s work has appeared in Granta, the Guardian and the Paris Review among other places.
Bookread2day 