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.

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

Review Citations: 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