Elita

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum’s most recent collection of fiction, What We Do with the Wreckage, won the 2017 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her two previous collections are Swimming with Strangers and This Life She’s Chosen, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick of the Month. Elita is her first novel. She lives near Seattle.

"I devoured this novel, held sway by its expert construction and luminous prose, and am haunted still by the wise and impossible questions that simmer under its breathless plot and within its indelible characters. Elita belongs on a shelf among the great literary page-turners of our time.”—Melissa Febos, author of Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative"An unforgettable book that will haunt you, as it did me, long after you set it down.”—Alix Ohlin, author of We Want What We Want"Brimming with sharp wit and tender observations, Elita strikes a superb balance between scientific scrutiny and the depth of human emotions. Lunstrum's prose surprises us with its taut, keenly observed beauty, delving into the precarity of women in a society where control works behind the facade of civility"—Kristen Millares Young, author of Subduction"Bernadette, a child development specialist and single mother, is tasked with teaching a nonverbal teenage girl—found alone on an island that houses a prison—to speak. Everything about the girl is shrouded in mystery: her origins, even her age. As Bernadette digs deeper, the questions only multiply. Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum charts the slow-burn relationship between these two unforgettable characters with a luminous sensitivity. Elita is a brooding, atmospheric tour de force of psychological suspense."—Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel