About Evanthia:
EVANTHIA BROMILEY is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the recipient of scholarships from the Aspen Institute, a Lighthouse Fellowship, a Lisel Mueller scholarship, and Elizabeth George and Carol Houck-Smith awards. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction can be found in AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Five Points, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Crown is her debut novel. She lives in Durango, Colorado.
About Crown:
A suspenseful, lyrical debut novel tracking three days leading up to the eviction of a pregnant single mother and her nine-year-old twins from a trailer park in the American Southwest.
Jude Woods is on the brink of eviction. Pregnant, jobless, and mother to Evan and Virginia, she has three days to box up her family’s life and find a safe place to live. In the Woods’ quiet trailer park, neighbors keep to themselves, but it’s no secret Jude and her twins are in jeopardy—the eviction notice slapped on their front door like a white shout.
When Jude’s contractions flare just as their power is shut off, she rushes to the hospital instructing Evan and Virginia to hide in their car in the surrounding fields. If the children are discovered outside alone, they will be taken from her. Jude labors through the night in a crowded emergency room while the twins, desperate in the heat of the cramped car and spurred by their wild imaginations, strike out along the dangerous riverbank in search of a new home for their growing family. As night hurtles toward the morning lockout, both mother and children reckon with what it means to live and dream in a modern America insistent on slamming doors.
Poetic and distinct, the voices of the three Woods open to a chorus of waitresses and oil men, veterans and graffiti artists as Crown trawls the laundromats, public bus systems, and waiting rooms of a forgotten blue-collar city. In this mesmerizing, singular debut, the tenacious spirit of a young family and their community comes to profound and moving life.
Praise:
“This is a book of poetry, every sentence offering up gifts. It is also a book built of deep suspense, a survival story of the first order. An evicted mother must leave her two children alone in the world while she goes to the hospital to give birth, and through the crucible of this crisis, each voice in this novel comes alive with ferocious originality and tenderness. Evanthia Bromiley writes at the intersection of poverty and motherhood better than almost anyone I know. Crownis an astonishing, revelatory first novel.”—Emily Fridlund, author of History of Wolves
About There are Reasons for This:
Lucy’s brother, Mikey, is dead. Two years ago, when he left their small Eastern Colorado town and moved west to Denver, he’d intended to bring Lucy along. But Lucy has only just arrived, and too late. She arrives in search of Helen, a woman Mikey loved. But when Lucy moves in across the hall, she finds nothing is as she expected: the city is crumbling; the weather is tempestuous; a predator is on the loose; the old woman in the attic needs company; desire is being compressed into pills and distributed like candy; and, most distressing of all, she finds herself becoming obsessed with Helen, who is nothing like she expected—and who has no idea who Lucy really is.
As Helen’s and Lucy’s lives become more entwined, Lucy begins to realize the real reasons she came to Denver are deeper and stranger than a simple desire to understand what happened to her brother. As a storm builds and the city falls apart, Lucy finds herself drawn further to Helen, and farther from her brother, questioning what makes a family and if love can ever really be found.
There Are Reasons for This is a modern love song about the fallibility of love—in all its iterations—about the denial and tethering of desire, about the family we are given and the one we find for ourselves, and to what comes next, whatever that may be.
Praise:
"Nini Berndt wonderfully makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. There Are Reasons for This immerses you in the unsettling but tender lives of its characters, whose yearning for connection powerfully mirrors our own. This is a truly memorable novel."
—Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History
About Nini:
Nini Berndt is a graduate of the MFA program in Fiction at the University of Florida. Her short work has appeared in One Story, The Southampton Review, Subtropics, Split Lip, Adroit, Passages North, and elsewhere. There Are Reasons for This is her debut novel. She teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, where she lives with her wife and son.
