Atomic Hearts

“Gertie is a heroine for the ages—I challenge you to find a reader who doesn’t fall in love with her dark humor, her vulnerability, her flaws, or her complicated affection for everyone around her. Atomic Hearts explodes with love and tenderness on every page.”—Maria Kuznetsova, author of Something Unbelievable “Heartfelt and harrowing . . . Reading Atomic Hearts feels like getting to crawl inside the mind of a quiet best friend.”—Allison Larkin, author of The People We Keep “A nuclear blast to the emotional core . . . Part teenage summer fling, part family tragedy, Megan Cummins’s debut is the most exquisitely written, bighearted journey into friendship, addiction, and the frustrations that come with parenting our parents. With sentences sharp enough to cut, dialogue that will make you laugh out loud, and a story that will break your heart open again and again, Atomic Hearts is the kind of novel that will send you scrambling for your phone to call your best friend, your mom, your dad, and let them know how much they matter.”—Nick Fuller Googins, author of The Great Transition “[An] impressive debut novel . . . This works equally well as a gritty coming-of-age drama and an insightful story about the nature of writing.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review “This [feels] quite effortless, mostly through the power of [Cummins’s] sharp prose and even sharper insights into, especially, the lives of teenage girls. A promising debut novel about the heavy presence of the past.”—Kirkus Review “Brilliant . . . explores the long path to self-fulfillment, how we discover our place in the world, and what we owe to others along the way. . . . Megan Cummins uncovers the troubling, intricate mystery of human connection, how we survive the worst of it, and sometimes don’t. She lays bare how we manage, despite enormous hurdles, to collapse the remote distances between us, and how each of us is a portal to worlds unseen.”—Sarah Blakely-Cartwright, author of Alice Sadie Celine “A live scroll on love, loyalty, who we are in our wrongdoings, and how we end up with the one we end up with . . . Cummins captures all of her characters in their wide and earnest humanness. This novel sustains the empathy it calls for and reminds us that one need not be a saint to achieve redemption. I closed the book at the end, but my heart was still open.”—Sidik Fofana, author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs “An exquisite first novel about the body’s fragility, the spirit's opacity, and the elastic absolution of narrative. Megan Cummins’s restless, devoted protagonist—a young writer working toward something like truth in the shadows of her father’s addiction, and in friendship’s frank light—is the kind of protagonist I’ll find myself thinking of years later, as of a good friend: ‘I should call Gertie.’”—Rachel Lyon, author of Self-Portrait with Boy and The Fruit of the Dead