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Published Jul 2019
320 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A vivid novel about a young Olympic skier who loses everything and escapes to Buenos Aires, where she reinvents herself, meets a colorful group of ex-pats, and becomes enmeshed with a man keeping dark secrets of his own.
Katie Cleary has always known exactly what she wants: to be the best skier in the world. As a teenager, she leaves her home to live and train full time with her two best friends, all-American brothers Luke and Blair, whose wealthy father has hired the best coaches money can buy. Together, they are the USA's best shot at bringing home Olympic gold.
But as the upward trajectory of Katie's elite skiing career nears its zenith, a terrifying truth about her sister becomes impossible to ignore—one that will lay ruin not only to Katie's career but to her family and her relationship with Luke and Blair.
With her life shattered and nothing left to lose, Katie flees the snowy mountainsides of home for Buenos Aires. There, she reinvents herself as Liz Sullivan, and meets a colorful group of ex-pats and the alluring, charismatic Gianluca Fortunado, a tango teacher with secrets of his own. This beautiful city, with its dark history and wild promise, seems like the perfect refuge, but can she really outrun her demons?
In alternating chapters, Katie grows up, falls in love, and races down the highest peaks on the planet—while Liz is reborn, falls into lust, and sinks into the underground tango scene at the bottom of the world. From the moneyed ski chalets of the American West to the dimly lit milongas of Argentina, We Came Here to Forget explores what it means to dream, to desire, to achieve—and what's left behind after it all disappears.
"Dunlop's prose is well-crafted, and when combined with the sights and sounds of Buenos Aires and the graceful insights into the surreal mechanisms of grief, it results in a memorable novel." - Publishers Weekly
"The twisty ride to the bottom is heartbreaking and compulsively readable." - Kirkus Reviews
"Andrea Dunlop's novels were made for book clubs." - Bustle
"Searing, gripping…Dunlop has crafted a complicated story of sisterhood unlike any told before." - Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
"Dunlop's globe-trotting story of two sisters driven apart by a devastating event is a propulsive whirlwind of secrets, passion, betrayal, exotic locations -- and hope. It's as timely as it is riveting." - J. Ryan Stradal, author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest
"Andrea is a talented, intuitive leader and storyteller, revealing details at just the right moment over and over again. There is so much genuine emotion and tension throughout the book ... a lot to think about in here, and oh yes—a lot of dancing in paradise (and in hell) too." - Caroline Kepnes, author of You
"As fast-paced as a downhill ski run, and as magical and sensuous as tango, We Came Here to Forget is about the drive to escape the trauma of the past—and the folly of that desire." - Edan Lepucki, bestselling author of California and Woman No. 17
This information about We Came Here to Forget 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.
Andrea Dunlop is the author of We Came Here to Forget, She Regrets Nothing, Losing the Light, and Broken Bay. She lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, where she works as a social media consultant.
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