If You Follow Me

"I love, love, love If You Follow Me. It's fearlessly honest, occasionally heartbreaking, and extremely funny, and I can't recommend it highly enough." -- Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times bestselling author of Prep and American Wife

In Malena Watrous' beautifully wrought and deftly written debut novel, we meet Marina, a young woman who has come to the small, rural Japanese town of Shika to teach English for a year. For her, Shika is more than just her home as a "temporary person." It's also an attempt to escape the reality that has followed her since her father committed suicide only a year earlier.

Marina is a big city girl is in a small town filled with off-beat characters, including an ambitious town matchmaker, a dentist looking for free English lessons, a high school student who idolizes Western rap artists, and finally Marina's America-obsessed supervisor, Hiro, a town leader whose friendship teaches her more than she ever expected.

If You Follow Me is at once a fish-out-of-water tale, a dark comedy of manners, and a strange kind of love story that explores the tension of being the outsider in an intimate community and the joy in finding that human nature is the same everywhere.

Author: Malena Watrous
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 03/09/2010
Pages: 384
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.64lbs
Size: 7.98h x 5.84w x 0.98d
ISBN: 9780061732850
Award: Lambda Literary Awards - Finalist
Award: Lambda Literary Awards - Finalist

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 01/18/2010 pg. 30
Romantic Times 03/01/2010 pg. 55 - Excellent
New York Times Book Review 04/04/2010 pg. 20
New York Times Book Review 04/11/2010 pg. 22

About the Author
Watrous, Malena: -

Malena Watrous's short fiction has appeared in Story Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Triquarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and Kyoto Journal. The winner of the Michener-Copernicus Award, she lives in San Francisco.