We Can Only Save Ourselves

"Alison Wisdom's addictive, down-the-rabbit-hole debut reads like The Girls by way of The Virgin Suicides, with an extra dash of Cheever's unsettling suburbia. The result is sinister and surprising: a novel I couldn't put down, and one that I kept thinking about long after I'd reached its unexpected, chilling end." —Emily Temple, author of The Lightness

One of Newsweek, Bustle, and LitHub's Most Anticipated Books and Goodreads' "Debut Novels to Discover in 2021," We Can Only Save Ourselves is the story of oneteenage girl’s unlikely indoctrination and the reverberations in the tight-knitcommunity she leaves behind.

Alice Lange’s neighbors are proud to know her—a high-achievingstudent, cheerleader, and all-around good citizen, she’s a perfect emblem oftheir sunny neighborhood. The night before she’s expected tobe crowned Homecoming Queen, though, she commits an act of vandalism, thendisappears, following a magnetic stranger named Wesley to a bungalow in anotherpart of the state. There, he promises, Alice can be her true self, shedding theshackles of conformity.

At the bungalow, however, she learnsthat four other young women seeking enlightenment and adventure have alreadyfollowed him there. Her new lifestyle is intoxicating at first, but as Wesley’sdemands on all of them increase, the house becomes a pressure cooker—until oneday they reach the point of no return.

Back home, the story of Alice’sdisappearance and radicalization is framed by the first-person plural chorus ofthe mothers who knew her before, who worry about her, but also resent the tearshe made in the fabric of their perfect world, one that exposes the question: Isn’tsuburbia a kind of cult unto itself?

Combining the sharp socialcritique of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere with the elegiac beautyof Emma Cline’s The Girls, this is a fierce literary debut from a writerto watch.

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