MOTHER'S DAY SPECIALS! SHOW ME MORE
Joan Maki grew up on the farm acquired by her Finnish great-grandparents, stoking a deep affinity for open fields, pitch-black nights, and folklore. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Montana in Missoula, and lives in western Montana with her family. Undercurrents is her first novel.
"""A haunted novel of knowing and not knowing, Undercurrents is a story of childhood fears, and the tragic loss of innocence when those fears come true. Maki does the seemingly impossible: writing both past and present simultaneously, marrying memory and reckoning in an entirely new way. Undercurrents is a stunning debut and introduces a shining new talent."" - Elizabeth Gonzalez James, author of The Bullet Swallower ""Joan Maki's story-telling terrain is the permeable border between the explicit and the intuited, between the present and the remembered, between freedom and entrapment. In specific, incandescent sentences, her debut novel signals the presence of a singular talent and a new voice that is capable of conveying what is most untalkable and haunting about certain lives in the contemporary American West. Few readers will leave Undercurrents feeling unchanged."" - Deirdre McNamer, author of Aviary “In Joan Maki’s darkly wondrous debut novel Undercurrents, the inexplicable folktale-infused disappearance of childhood friend Patrick traps siblings Kit and Paul in a decades-long, splintered cycle of attempted retelling. Told in trim, sparkling prose—and featuring mythic evocations of the woods, mountains, and cold rivers of Montana—this novel offers a masterful and moving portrait of the reality-bending mysteries of grief.” - Joseph Scapellato, author of The Made-Up Man and Big Lonesome"
