We Can Only Save Ourselves : A Novel

"Alison Wisdom's addictive, down-the-rabbit-hole debut reads likeThe Girlsby way ofThe Virgin Suicides, with an extra dash of Cheever's unsettling suburbia. The result is sinister and surprising: a novel I couldn't put down, and one that I kept thinking about long after I'd reached its unexpected, chilling end." Emily Temple, author ofThe Lightness

One of Newsweek,Bustle, and LitHub's Most Anticipated Books andGoodreads' "Debut Novels to Discover in 2021,"We Can Only Save Ourselves is the story of one teenage girls unlikely indoctrination and the reverberations in the tight-knit community she leaves behind.

Alice Langes neighbors are proud to know hera high-achieving student, cheerleader, and all-around good citizen, shes a perfect emblem of their sunny neighborhood. The night before shes expected to be crowned Homecoming Queen, though, she commits an act of vandalism, then disappears, following a magnetic stranger named Wesley to a bungalow in another part of the state. There, he promises, Alice can be her true self, shedding the shackles of conformity.

At the bungalow, however, she learns that four other young women seeking enlightenment and adventure have already followed him there. Her new lifestyle is intoxicating at first, but as Wesleys demands on all of them increase, the house becomes a pressure cookeruntil one day they reach the point of no return.

Back home, the story of Alices disappearance and radicalization is framed by the first-person plural chorus of the mothers who knew her before, who worry about her, but also resent the tear she made in the fabric of their perfect world, one that exposes the question: Isnt suburbia a kind of cult unto itself?

Combining the sharp social critique of Celeste Ngs Little Fires Everywhere with the elegiac beauty of Emma Clines The Girls, this is a fierce literary debut from a writer to watch.