Take Me Apart
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
An Indie Next Pick for May 2020
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‘Most Anticipated: The Great First-Half of 2020 Preview’—The Millions
‘20 Most Anticipated Debuts of Early 2020’—Electric Lit
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‘21 Debut Authors to Discover Now’—GoodReads
‘Alma’s Favorite Books for Spring 2020’—Hey Alma
‘2020 Titles to Watch’—Library Journal
Journalist Kate Aitken leaves New York for a fresh start in California and a new job: as an archivist for the estate of famed photographer Miranda Brand, who died mysteriously some decades earlier. Miranda’s son, Theo, has returned to the family home after his father’s death, and needs Kate to organise his mother’s work and the mess of her personal effects.
The further Kate digs into the material, the more a picture begins to emerge of a vibrant artist buckling under the pressures of ambition, motherhood and marriage. But Kate has secrets of her own, including a growing attraction to the enigmatic Theo, and when she stumbles across Miranda’s diary, her curiosity spirals into a dangerous obsession.
A darkly seductive tale of two magnetic women pinned down by secrets and lies, Take Me Apart is also a chilling, thought-provoking take on art, illness and power, from a spellbinding new voice in psychological suspense.
Sara Sligar is an author and academic based in Los Angeles, where she teaches English and creative writing as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s in History from the University of Cambridge. Her writing has been published in McSweeney’s, Quartz, The Hairpin and other outlets. Take Me Apart is her first novel.
‘A dark, thoughtful thriller.’ Washington Post
‘At the center of this dark drama is mental illness…Reading it is painful. Yet, these are some of the novel’s strongest pages…A reading experience like peeling an onion layer by layer…You can put this book down, just not for long.’ USA Today
‘A sun-soaked noir...Like any good noir, Take Me Apart has frequent flashes of fine art, and many passages sparkle with Sligar’s style...Sligar explores the sticky territory of power dynamics between men and women, whether boss and employee, teacher and student, or husband and wife. She threads a scathing feminist critique throughout both narratives, nailing all the right talking points of the current discourse.' LA Review of Books
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sligar's perceptive debut follows two women who appear collected on the surface but silently endure struggles. After 30-year-old Kate Aitken loses her copyediting job at a New York newspaper amid a disbelieved sexual harassment complaint against her superior, she moves to Northern California to take on a temporary archivist position, where she's tasked with organizing the personal papers of photographer Miranda Brand, whose death two decades earlier was ruled a suicide. Supervised by Miranda's adult son, Theo, Kate spends hours sifting through letters, receipts, and prints, and begins to suspect Miranda was murdered. As she builds her case, sneaking around to interview locals who knew the artist, Kate develops feelings for Theo and his two young children, and begins to shut out anything not involving the Brands. Alternating between chapters focusing on Kate and epistolary documents by the tormented Miranda, Sligar reveals Miranda's unraveling throughout her brilliant career as she labors with parenthood and life with a manipulative husband. Though the novel falters somewhat in its home stretch, Sligar shows off a keen ear for dialogue, and Kate and Miranda hold interest. With a cool style and fast pace, Sligar achieves a propulsive exploration of these ambitious women's inner turbulence in response to an abusive man in each of their lives.
