Fire Exit

Shortlisted for the 2024 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

A lone white man lives beside the river on the edge of the Penobscot reservation in Maine. Charles spends his days doing odd jobs, looking after his depressive mother, and staring across the water to the house in which his half-Native daughter Elizabeth has grown up, unaware of his existence, her paternity hidden to protect her tribal status. Yet the cracks in the foundations of Elizabeth’s life are beginning to show, and Charles can see Elizabeth is struggling, much like his own mother does. He firmly believes the truth will set them all free – but the price of it may be the destruction of them all.

A deeply layered story of family and blood ties, full of quiet, beautiful, and dignified sentences, Fire Exit shows us kinship from all angles, and its capacity to break down, re-form, fade, or strengthen, while always remaining a part of us.

'Utterly consuming … spellbinding and quietly devastating … a sober reckoning with what love can and cannot do, what healing is and is not possible in our families. The novel absolutely smoulders.' Tommy Orange