Awake Awake

From the Booker Prize finalist, a mesmerizing spiral of a novel whose unreliable narrator and her endearing, idiosyncratic group of friends reckon with the psychological weight of history, as it seeps into their everyday lives and relationships.

Mary has started remembering things that she knows aren't real—but the events feel exactly like her actual memories. Who is she, if she can't be sure she knows her own past? A writer in her 30s struggling to make rent, Mary has moved back to her childhood town to bartend and save money, when she starts remembering absurd events, clear and visceral as if they’d really happened to her. But she knows they’re too wild to be possible.

Flashing back to her school years, she searches the past for what could have caused this split in her reality. The lives of their close group of school friends have since diverged, as life choices and politics, partners and children, have taken them to different places and placed them into other stories. But Mary must reconnect with them to find solid ground again.

Set against the disorienting and rapidly changing political backdrop of the 2000s and 2010s, Fiona Mozley’s disarming coming-of-age tale is addictively readable, and poignantly captures the shakiness of identity – both personal and national – and the anchoring force of friendship.