Save Your Own

“I am a full-grown woman who looks like a ten-year-old boy, and not even a very handsome or cute one at that … My mind, thankfully, has more to recommend it.”

So begins Save Your Own, a wicked satire as well as a rewarding story of self-transformation. Gillian Cormier-Brandenburg, intensely cerebral, narcoleptic, and a virgin, is in her final year at Harvard Divinity School. She needs simply to write her thesis and collect her diploma. But Gillian’s life takes a sharp U-turn when the faculty deem her thesis topic, “secular conversion,” unsuitable and threaten to cancel her funding. Determined to prove them wrong, she sets out to gather data and takes a job at a halfway house for addicted women.

Here she must quickly transform herself from obedient graduate student into hardcore authority figure. The women push every limit she has, and Gillian finds herself at once repelled by their crass ways and in awe of their gutsy impulsiveness. Ultimately, they inspire her to realize her own true impulses and desires, as well as her need for love, which she’s ignored for too long.

Infused with a buoyant humor and striking intelligence, Save Your Own announces the arrival of a sparkling new voice in contemporary fiction.