A wildly inventive exhilarating debut narrated by a young woman meditating on her Czech
ancestors' 'falling curse' her twin brother's fall from a window and the malleable breakable
bonds keeping her family from falling apart. One thing that the city of Prague is famous for is
throwing men out of windows. The word for this is defenestration. In 1895 Marta's
great-great-grandfather Jirí was said to have given a gentle push to the back of a stonemason
for having wronged him. The stonemason fell to his death and the family fled the Czech capital
for the American Midwest where they set up a new life. So begins the story of Marta and her
brother Nick deeply interwoven twins haunted by the mysterious curse that has plagued their
family for centuries one that has doomed them to suffer various types of falls. And when Nick
falls out of a window and ends up seriously injured Marta embarks on a heart-breaking quest to
discover whether or not his fall was intentional and to stop her family from falling apart.
Grappling with family myths sexual identity and mental illness Defenestrate is a novel about
the kinds of tales we tell ourselves and others in order to survive - and how those stories can
both protect and betray us. From a major new voice in literary fiction Defenestrate is a novel
about belonging and finding one's place in a world in which you are quite literally
plummeting.
