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A Novel
by Sara van Os
An emotional, electrifying, and darkly hilarious debut about a woman who finds a dead body and can't give up its ghost, for fans of Mona Awad, Yellowjackets, and weird girl fiction.
Spiraling from a disastrous falling-out with her best friend, Savannah retreats to her parents' empty lake house in upstate New York to tend her wounds. Isolated and reeling from rejection, she spends her days in a fog, drinking and overthinking in equal worrisome measure. Until she wakes up one morning in the woods behind the house—next to a dead body.
Instead of calling the police, Savannah reads the journal she finds nearby, reliving the last desperate months of this woman's life lost in the wilderness, fighting for survival. Ava, as it turns out, is more than just a cold, lonely corpse. She was funny. She was smart. And Savannah has finally found someone she can talk to…
As she pushes deeper into Ava's harrowing story, Savannah notices a change, a shift in her reality. Each page brings her closer to the Ava from the journal…and the ghost before her now. Before long, Savannah feels something for Ava she hasn't felt for anyone else—and there's a good chance letting go would haunt her for the rest of her life.
Is Savannah finally losing her grip? Or has she found the friend she's needed all along?
"Fans of Yellowjackets will eat up this queer, psychologically chaotic tale. A decadently bizarre novel for fans of queer survival stories." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"In spite of their grim circumstances, the characters are endearing, their queer relationships characterized by overwhelming compassion and leavened by a gentle dark humor. This is sure to win van Os many fans." —Publishers Weekly
"Gripping and inventive, Decomposition Book confronts what it is possible to endure for love." —Booklist
"Intense, irreverent, surprising, raw. I relished every minute of Sara van Os's debut and—heart in mouth—will be coming back for more." —Natalia Theodoridou, author of Sour Cherry
"Told with delicious humor and surprising grace, Decomposition Book is a compulsively readable story of courage, of desire, of unrelenting love, and of what is left when one's humanity is stripped away—whether by loss, obsession, or rot. A marvelously strange novel, both unprecedented and unforgettable." —Kerry Cullen, author of House of Beth
This information about Decomposition Book 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.
Sara van Os is a Mexican-American decomposition nerd who lives in Harlem with her wife and two cats. She has a bachelor's degree from NYU in English and German and a minor in Clarinet Performance, because she loves a good side quest. Since college, she has been working in hospitality as everyone's favorite manager and lives to gather stories of weird happenings at work. Decomposition Book is her debut novel.
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