If You Follow Me

<p><strong>I love love love </strong><em><strong>If You Follow Me</strong></em><strong>. It's fearlessly honest occasionally heartbreaking and extremely funny and I can't recommend it highly enough. -- Curtis Sittenfeld </strong><em><strong>New York Times</strong></em><strong> bestselling author of </strong><em><strong>Prep</strong></em><strong> and </strong><em><strong>American Wife</strong></em></p><p>In Malena Watrous' beautifully wrought and deftly written debut novel we meet Marina a young woman who has come to the small rural Japanese town of Shika to teach English for a year. For her Shika is more than just her home as a temporary person. It's also an attempt to escape the reality that has followed her since her father committed suicide only a year earlier. </p><p>Marina is a big city girl is in a small town filled with off-beat characters including an ambitious town matchmaker a dentist looking for free English lessons a high school student who idolizes Western rap artists and finally Marina's America-obsessed supervisor Hiro a town leader whose friendship teaches her more than she ever expected.</p> <p><em>If You Follow Me</em> is at once a fish-out-of-water tale a dark comedy of manners and a strange kind of love story that explores the tension of being the outsider in an intimate community and the joy in finding that human nature is the same everywhere.</p>