Defenestrate: The debut to fall for in 2022

A young woman meditating on her Czech ancestors' falling curse, her twin brother's fall from a window, and the malleable, breakable bonds keeping her family from falling apart narrates the novel Defenestrate. It is a story about the mysteries that haunt us and the stories we tell ourselves to survive, and how those stories can both protect and betray us.

Format: Hardback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 10 February 2022
Publisher: Vintage Publishing

A young woman meditating on her Czech ancestors' falling curse, her twin brother's fall from a window, and the malleable, breakable bonds keeping her family from falling apart narrates a wildly inventive, exhilarating debut. The city of Prague is famous for throwing men out of windows, known as defenestration. In 1895, Marta's great-great-grandfather Jirí was said to have given a gentle push to the back of a stonemason for having wronged him. The stonemason fell to his death, and the family fled the Czech capital for the American Midwest, where they set up a new life.

So begins the story of Marta and her brother Nick, deeply interwoven twins haunted by the mysterious curse that has plagued their family for centuries, one that has doomed them to suffer various types of falls. And when Nick falls out of a window and ends up seriously injured, Marta embarks on a heart-breaking quest to discover whether or not his fall was intentional and to stop her family from falling apart.

Grappling with family myths, sexual identity, and mental illness, Defenestrate is a novel about the kinds of tales we tell ourselves and others to survive and how those stories can both protect and betray us. From a major new voice in literary fiction, Defenestrate is a novel about belonging and finding one's place in a world in which you are, quite literally, plummeting.

Weight: 352g
Dimension: 144 x 223 x 27 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781787333390