A Marker to Measure Drift (Knopf Publishing)
Alexander Maksik, author of You Deserve Nothing, returns to Skylight Books with his new novel, A Marker to Measure Drift.
This exciting new novel tracks a woman's journey from the horrors of Charles Taylor's Liberia to abject poverty and self-exile on a Greek island, where she must grapple with a haunted past and find a way back into human society.
On an island somewhere in the Aegean, Jacqueline, a young Liberian woman, veers between starvation and satiety, between the brutality of her past and the precarious uncertainty of her present in the aftermath of experiences so unspeakable that she prefers homeless numbness to the psychological confrontation she knows is inevitable. Hypnotic, highly sensual, exquisitely written, and extraordinary in its depiction of both pleasure and pain, of excruciating physical and spiritual hungers, A Marker to Measure Drift is a novel about memory, how we live with what we know, and whether and how we go forward, intact and whole, after the ravages of loss. It is beautiful, lacerating, impossible to put down. A breakthrough work from a prodigiously gifted young writer."A Marker to Measure Drift is a haunting, haunted novel. Things get stripped down to essentials--food, water, where to sleep for the night, a state of solitary desperation brought on by the most profound kind of loss. Every line of this excellent novel rings true as Maksik leads us toward the catastrophe at the story's core. This is one of those books that leaves you staring into space when you finish, dazed from the sheer power of what's been said." --Ben Fountain (author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk)
Praise for You Deserve Nothing:
"Rivetingly plotted and beautifully written . . . dazzling clarity and impressive philosophical rigor." --The New York Times
"One of the most engaged reads I've had in years." --Alice Sebold (author of The Lovely Bones)
Alexander Maksik is the author of the novel You Deserve Nothing. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, his writing has appeared in Harper's, Tin House, Harvard Review, The New York Times Magazine, Salon, and Narrative Magazine, among others, and has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
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