An enthralling debut novel by Governor General’s Literary Awards finalist Maria Mutch that is an inventive exploration of time, absence, and desire.

I feel in some strange place.

In late January 2010, choreographer Molly Volkova has a seizure on a crowded Manhattan sidewalk.

As Molly experiences the singularity of the seizure over the course of seven minutes, she is haunted by her past: memories of love and infidelity, thoughts of her family and her work, and of the city itself. She also reflects on the disappearance of a lover she last saw ten years earlier, his sister, and the secrets that connect all three of them.

Flickering through time and space and from character to character, Molly Falls to Earth forms a constellation around the spot where Molly lies on the edge of Washington Square Park. Interwoven throughout are documentary segments featuring the voices of others who search for the lost, obsessed with those who have gone missing.

With her extraordinary ability to capture the unimaginable, Maria Mutch takes us deep into a stormy world in which people disappear without going anywhere, and appear to be present while travelling vast distances.

Maria Mutch is a Canadian writer whose memoir, Know the Night, was a finalist for both the Governor General’s Literary Awards and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and was listed in The Globe and Mail’s Top 100 and Maclean’s Best Reads. Her debut short story collection, When We Were Birds, received stellar reviews, and her writing has appeared in Guernica, The Malahat Review, and Poets & Writers. She lives in Rhode Island with her husband and two sons. Visit her at MariaMutch.com or follow her on Twitter @Maria_Mutch.

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“Highly anticipated.”
— Toronto Star

“The presiding spirit of [this] collection is Ovid singing of souls transformed to bodies new and strange. . . . read[s] like fragments of Angela Carter fairy tales.”
— The Literary Review of Canada

“Beautiful and breathtakingly expansive, Molly Falls to Earth captures the delicate and dramatic pull of relationships in a city that swallows people up and hides them in plain sight. The beauty of great art and choreography, the unfillable voids and grand seizures that rule us, and the fragile and tough connections of human relationships are distilled here in perfect prose. An absolutely resplendent novel.”
— MARJAN KAMALI, author of The Stationery Shop

“From Joyce to Woolf to Ambrose Bierce, the challenge of expressing the infinite multitude that inhabits any single human minute persists. In this earthy, wry, passionate, and unexpected novel, Mutch dances us with a new choreography of the heart. It’s a beautiful, symphonic piece of work, at once grounded and fully electric.”
— CLAUDIA CASPER, author of The Mercy Journals

“A wholly original debut collection of short fiction [that] deconstructs and reimagines the short story, in much the same way Anne Carson’s work reimagines the possibilities of the poetic form. . . . The collection as a whole is a fierce and often brutal examination of personal transformation, rendered visceral and gorgeous by Mutch’s exceeding talent and focus on the body. . . . Mutch channels the dark arts of Angela Carter, combining elements of gruesome fairy tale, an emphasis on the corporeal and a critical feminist lens on the world. . . . These are stories that thrum with weird, otherworldly power. Reading When We Were Birds is like peering too long into the sun, to the moment your vision blurs and the world takes on a dangerously surreal and mortal beauty.”
— Toronto Star

Praise for Molly Falls to Earth

“Highly imaginative. . . . quizzical and melancholy . . . eerily au courant.”
— Quill & Quire

Praise for When We Were Birds

“An inventive exploration of time, absence, and desire.”
— 49th Shelf

“A collection of fairy tales for grown-ups. Maria Mutch’s short stories contain a touch of whimsical—but undeniably dark—magic. Think more Grimm folklore than Disney Technicolor. . . . the perfect precursor to drifting into dreamworld.”
— Canadian Living