The Likely World

Book excerpt: “[T]hemes of motherhood, love, and addiction collide in heartbreaking and dangerous ways” in this provocative and fascinating debut novel (Publishers Weekly). After twenty years of addiction to cloud, a drug which wipes the user’s short-term memory, Mellie’s mind is a messy collection of fragments. Now a single mother, she has decided to get clean with the help of a tough-minded sponsor. She desperately clings to her fragile sobriety, but on the evening of her twenty-ninth day sober, a stranger pulls into Mellie’s driveway—and her heart surges. To protect her new life and her two-year-old daughter, Mellie must now piece together the shards of her traumatic past. Shifting between 1988 and 2010, Melanie Conroy-Goldman’s debut novel is “bizarre and beautiful, equal parts brainy lit and gut-bucket pulp” (Mary Gaitskill, author of Bad Behavior).