Forever Egg

Forever Egg is a debut short story collection that explores questions of love, identity, and shame. Across a dozen linked stories, Tierney Oberhammer skillfully brings readers into the hearts and deeply-held fears of her characters, while carefully unfolding a bigger picture of how everything is connected.

A young boy gets caught up in his parents' quiet, working-class desperation during a family beach trip in 1980. Decades later, a school teacher finds unexpected romance while healing from a long-awaited rhinoplasty. A volcanic eruption on a Caribbean island in 2018 forces a culinary prodigy to confront a choice that may wound the person she loves most. A struggling mother in New York then makes a dangerous attempt to silence her daughter's memories of a past life. Centuries later, in 2400, descendants protect a precious family heirloom—one that began as a kitchen-counter science experiment—as humanity leaves Earth.

With wry humor and clear-eyed tenderness, Forever Egg asks the question: what do we owe the people we love and how do our choices reverberate across time?

Early Praise

"Tierney Oberhammer's stories explore the places in between: the weeks between period and pregnancy, the wait between surgery and recovery, the distance between parent and child, the bridge between funeral and one-night stand, the overlap between past lives and new lives, the ship sailing between volcanic disaster and escape. With all the well-deserved confidence of an experienced cartographer, Oberhammer maps out the uneasy terrain of our existence. This collection is a crisp, assured, and gorgeous debut."

—Julia Phillips, best-selling author of Bear and Disappearing Earth

"There is nothing quite like a Tierney Oberhammer story. Each one in this collection gives us a glimpse into a world so vivid, fraught, and richly imagined that it lives on in us as a tiny earthquake of feeling."

—Mira Jacob, best-selling author of Good Talk

"Forever Egg is a wonder. Wielding sentences of an almost fluorescent precision, Oberhammer carves out a literary space all her own. These are stories that are unafraid to raise and linger with the largest and thorniest of questions—about race, identity, class, and cruelty—and that render, both sensitively and mercilessly, the slips and snags of the attempt to connect with others while still engaged in the project of constructing a self. This collection heralds the arrival of a star."

—Clare Beams, author of The Garden

"More than a short story collection, Forever Egg is an intricate labyrinth where the search for self is eternal and cyclic; where strangers, driven by the same yearning to belong, find and lose each other.

Tierney Oberhammer captures the in-between existence, particularly the struggle of multi-racial identities, with an honesty and tenderness like no other writer. She invites the readers to dwell in the quiet anguish and shame of minority experience. She taps into the sweeping despair of our modern life. And she does so in a voice that is original, subtle and deeply moving."

—Kangkang Li Kovacs, author of Nothing to My Name