Island City
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A woman spills the story of her life to a bar full of strangers, in the acerbic first novel from Laura Adamczyk.
Anything can become the story of your life if you let it, and I suppose this became mine.
In Island City, a wry, wistful woman, estranged from her family, sells her belongings and moves back to her hometown in the Midwest. To her, it’s the “perfect place to give up.” She wants to get rid of everything—her stuff, her ambitions. Before making a “messy exit,” she holes up in a dark bar and tells her stories to an audience of indifferent strangers. There’s the time the river dried up and you could walk across its bed; the day her sister got clobbered at the nursing home; when her dad got cancer, then Alzheimer’s, then cancer again. Now she’s forgetting things the way he did, words slipping away. That third drink isn’t helping.
Laura Adamczyk, whose writing is “super weird” and “super unsettling” (Eugenia Williamson, The Boston Globe), creates a full portrait of a person, even as the image blurs and fades. Delivered as a booze-soaked monologue, Island City is a funny, devastating first novel, one that bristles and burns with true feeling.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Adamczyk's discursive debut, a woman returns to her Midwestern hometown, having given up on making something of herself. After settling back into her mother's house in Island City, the unnamed narrator, 37, spends the length of the novel drinking in a bar and telling her life story. (Island City is "the perfect place to give up," she claims.) A series of anecdotes reveal information about the narrator's family, her parent's divorce, her abusive stepfather, her troubled relationships with her mother and sister, and her career's downward trajectory, which peaked with a job writing for a "not great website." She also details heart-wrenching memories of caring for her father, who died from cancer at 52, as well as the harrowing discovery of a dozen dead cats while cleaning out his garage. Before the cancer, her father had dementia, a condition she believes she shares, as "words became elusive." Though the timeline is about as easy to follow as a barfly's drunken ramble, Adamczyk hits her stride as the narrator begins to reckon with her roots. The format will test readers' patience, but those willing to wait it out will find some affecting moments.
