Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2017
288 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A bleakly comic tour de force that's by turns poignant, uproariously funny, and viscerally unsettling, this debut novel has shades of Bernhard, Beckett, and Bowles - and it announces the singular voice of Patty Yumi Cottrell.
Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, childless, college educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York. She is accepting a furniture delivery in her shared studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the news: Helen's adoptive brother is dead.
According to the Internet, there are six possible reasons why her brother might have killed himself. But Helen knows better: she knows that six reasons is only shorthand for 'the abyss.' Helen also knows that she alone is qualified to launch a serious investigation into his death, so she purchases a one-way ticket to Milwaukee. There, as she searches her childhood home and attempts to uncover why someone would choose to die, she will face her estranged family, her brother's few friends, and the overzealous grief counselor, Chad Lambo; she may also discover what it truly means to be alive.
"Starred Review [A] stellar debut novel ... Cottrell gives Helen the impossible task of understanding what would drive another person to suicide, and the result is complex and mysterious, yet, in the end, deeply human and empathetic." - Publishers Weekly
"Helen's foggy view of reality is a dark, dark comedic well, and debut novelist Cottrell tells her story with gutsy style, glowing sentences, and true feeling." - Booklist
"Patty Yumi Cottrell's prose does so many of my favorite things -some too subtle to talk about without spoiling, but one thing I have to mention is the way in which her heroine's investigation of a suicide draws the reader right into the heart of this wonderfully spiky hedgehog of a book and then elbows us yet further along into what is ultimately a tremendously moving act of imagination." - Helen Oyeyemi, author of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
"In this completely absorbing novel of devastation and estrangement, Patty Yumi Cottrell introduces herself as a modern Robert Walser. Her voice is unflinching, unforgettable, and animated with a restless sense of humor." - Catherine Lacey, author of Nobody Is Ever Missing
"Intelligent and mysterious and funny, Patty Yumi Cottrell's Sorry to Disrupt the Peace moves so mesmerizingly towards its blazingly good ending. One is tempted to read it as quickly as possible. But really, it is a book that should be read slowly, as some of its deepest pleasures lie in the careful observations, the witty prose, and just the book's really wonderful gaze on city life, and actually, on all life. This is a stunning debut." - Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat
"Patty Yumi Cottrell's adoption of the rambling and specific absurd will and must delight. This is a graceful claim not just about writing but about a way of being in the world, an always new and necessary way to contend with this garbage that surrounds us, these false portraits of our hearts and minds. This book is not a diversion - it's a lifeline." - Jesse Ball, author of How to Set a Fire and Why
"Grief takes an unnerving path through a singular mind in Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. Beckett fans will find a familiar, but Patty Yumi Cottrell's voice is her very own." - Amelia Gray, author of Gutshot: Stories
"A sort of Korean-American noir, lean and wry and darkly compelling, I respectfully suggest you read her now." - Ed Park, author of Personal Days
"Patty Yumi Cottrell's Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is a beguiling debut: absurdly funny, surprisingly beautiful, and ultimately sad as fuck." - Danielle Dutton, author of Margaret the First
"Sorry to Disrupt the Peace had me opening my mouth to laugh only to feel sobs come tumbling out. It's absurd, feeling so much at once, but it's a distinctly human absurdity that Patty Yumi Cottrell has masterfully created in this book. In the end I felt ebullient and spent, grateful to be reminded that life is only funny and gorgeous because life is also strange and sad." - Lindsay Hunter, author of Ugly Girls
"Disturbing and hilarious, Cottrell's haunting debut explores the toxic fumes that radiate from the narrator's dysfunctional familial network, arresting development, truncating lives, and dragging everything into a vertiginous chasm the narrator, Helen Moran, investigates. Cottrell seduces her readers into an uncanny abyss." - Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, author of Fra Keeler
This information about Sorry to Disrupt the Peace was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Patty Yumi Cottrell's work has appeared in BOMB, Gulf Coast, and Black Warrior Review, among other places. She lives in Los Angeles.
The Flower Sisters
by Michelle Collins Anderson
From the new Fannie Flagg of the Ozarks, a richly-woven story of family, forgiveness, and reinvention.
The Stone Home
by Crystal Hana Kim
A moving family drama and coming-of-age story revealing a dark corner of South Korean history.
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu
Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
