Description
Winner of the 2017 Barnes and Nobel Discover Great New Writers Award in Fiction
Winner of a 2018 Whiting Award in Fiction
Winner of Independent Publisher Book Award’s Gold Medal for First Fiction
A Spring 2017 B&N Discover Great New Writers Fiction Winner
Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, childless, college-educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York. She’s accepting a delivery from IKEA in her shared studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the news: Helen’s adoptive brother is dead.
According to the internet, there are six possible reasons why her brother might have killed himself. But Helen knows better: she knows that six reasons is only shorthand for
the abyss. Helen also knows that she alone is qualified to launch a serious investigation into his death, so she purchases a one-way ticket to Milwaukee. There, as she searches her childhood home and attempts to uncover why someone would choose to die, she will face her estranged family, her brother’s few friends, and the overzealous grief counselor, Chad Lambo; she may also discover what it truly means to be alive.
A bleakly comic tour de force that’s by turns poignant, uproariously funny, and viscerally unsettling, this debut novel has shades of Bernhard, Beckett and Bowles and it announces the singular voice of Patrick Cottrell.
Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Patrick Cottrell
Published: 01/13/2026
Publisher: McSweeney’s
ISBN: 9781963270648
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 0.90″ H x 7.90″ L x 5.40″ W
About the Author
Patrick Cottrell’s work has appeared in BOMB, Gulf Coast, and Black Warrior Review, among other places. He lives in Los Angeles.
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