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Defenestrate
Defenestrate
Dec 2, 2025 4:01 PM

Author:Renee Branum

Defenestrate

The 'hypnotic...addictive' (New York Times) debut novel narrated by a young woman meditating on the malleable, breakable bonds keeping her family from falling apart.

There's a superstition in our family about falling...

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 Prague 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. When Nick tumbles out of a window and ends up seriously injured, Marta must embark on a heartbreaking quest to discover whether or not his fall was intentional, and to stop her family from falling apart...

'Wonderful...with an idiosyncratic humour that reminded me of Ottessa Moshfegh' Daily Telegraph

'Original and engaging' Guardian

'Lights up the imagination' Dina Nayeri

Reviews

Defenestrate is an original and engaging novel from a fresh new voice, one deeply committed to understanding the beguiling experience of twinship, and to writing twins from the inside.

—— Jude Cook , Guardian

Original...with an idiosyncratic humour that reminded me of Ottessa Moshfegh... there are some wonderful digressions about...comic genius that shouldn't really work, but do.

—— Alasdair Lees , Daily Telegraph, *Books to Look Out For 2022*

Branum is a weaver of light, a writer of extraordinary sensitivity and insight. Her obsessions are contagious, and her prose is electric.

—— Karen Russell

Renée Branum writes with exceptional wisdom and tenderness about inheritance, obsession, and the power of storytelling... Defenestrate builds to a symphonic, exhilarating end.

—— Sanaë Lemoine, author of THE MARGOT AFFAIR

Branum's prose lights up the imagination, every line a discovery and a pleasure. Beyond simple elegance or precision, she weaves sense and simile so stunningly, you have to throw your hands up and say damn!

—— Dina Nayeri, author of THE UNGRATEFUL REFUGEE and REFUGE

The wonders of this beautiful novel come to you the way ghosts do, almost invisibly, and from the past. The voice is haunted too, by family secrets, the history of Prague, an addiction, and much else... This is a fine and wonderful book.

—— Charles Baxter, author of THE SUN COLLECTIVE

An original, idiosyncratic debut

—— Daily Telegraph, *Summer Reads of 2022*

A compassionate, many-layered chronicle of trauma and recovery following mob violence in contemporary India, One Small Voice is a wonderful, timely contribution to world literature

—— Tsitsi Dangarembga, author of This Mournable Body

Exceptional ... Bhattacharya gives us India in all its messy glory ... Heartbreaking and yet so full of hope

—— Melody Razak, author of Moth

Bhattacharya has the enviable ability of creating a cast of characters that feel as real as any person I've met. His effortless writing sings on the page

—— Kasim Ali, author of Good Intentions

Whilst the plot turns on our capacity for cruelty, Bhattacharya's book brims with compassion. A novel about the complexities of adulthood, and the shame we all carry, that is both fearless and kind

—— Clare Pollard, author of Delphi

Thrilling ... Bhattacharya writes beautifully about friendship, family and the devastating consequences of secrecy and shame in a narrative that powerfully evokes the complexities of coming of age in modern India

—— Ben Fergusson, author of Tales from the Fatherland

Emotional and bold ... A rare voice that rewards us with hope and recognition

—— Tice Cin, author of Keeping the House

A thrilling reimagining of an infamous Greek figure

—— RED

A thrilling tale of power and prophecies, and the fierce Queen who fought back at those who wronged her

—— COSMOPOLITAN, 'The best books to look forward to in 2023'

If magical mythological books call your name, Clytemnestra is the one for you

—— Glamour UK

Swift-paced, straightforward storytelling, richly imagined characters. Timeless

—— Scotsman

Liz Berry ... sings of love, loss, grief, work, wonder, hope. To say I love this, the quiet power of it, would understate

—— Jackie Morris, author of The Unwinding

'Liz Berry's poems are captivating and charged with her characteristically rich and sensuous Black Country language. The Home Child brings to light the devastating history of forced child migration in the service of Empire and is a deeply moving tribute to the author's great aunt. This is a book that should be on the curriculum'

—— Naush Sabah

Liz Berry achieves a fusion of poetry and fiction as gripping as any thriller... Inspired by the true story of her great aunt...this compelling novel in verse is a moving portrait of a girl who will never see her family again

—— Daily Mail

A tour de force... Beautifully crafted and quietly devastating, The Home Child is a masterpiece

—— Literary Review

Deeply poignant, the words through The Home Child seem cut into each page and defy you to read them at speed

—— Family Tree Magazine

A wonderfully realised novel in verse

—— Guardian, *Books of the Year*

Free Love artfully delves beneath the veneer of the British middle class to tell an intimate story of generational discord, political change and sexual freedom.

—— Mark Vessery , i

Hadley's resplendent eighth novel... [has] poignantly astute observations on class, destiny and the false promises of the sexual revolution.

—— Hephzibah Anderson , Mail on Sunday

Hadley's eighth novel is as absorbing as any of her other fiction, with complex family secrets, brilliant insights...and lush descriptions of nature.

—— Markie Robson-Scott , Arts Desk

Hadley chooses her words with spellbinding precision.

—— Claire Allfree , Metro

Hadley's complex sentences are purring marvels of engineering... A brilliant writer of interiority...she has a gift...for portraying the state of wanting to be wanted, or simply to be seen... almost every page struck me anew with some elegant phrasing, feline irony or shrewdly sympathetic insight.

—— Anthony Cummins , Observer

Few contemporary novelists write about their characters' inner worlds with a finely filigreed but plain-spoken acuity that Tessa Hadley brings to her work...accessing roving, rich depths... Hadley is a master in her field.

—— Lucy Scholes , Daily Telegraph

"With each new book by Tessa Hadley, I grow more convinced that she's one of the greatest stylists alive. . . . To read Hadley's fiction is to grow self-conscious in the best way: to recognize with astonishment the emotions playing behind our own expressions, to hear articulated our own inchoate anxieties. . . . The whole grief-steeped story should be as fun as a dirge, but instead it feels effervescent-lit not with mockery but with the energy of Hadley's attention, her sensitivity to the abiding comedy of human desire. . . . Extraordinary.

—— The Washington Post

Brilliant.... In the hands of a lesser novelist, the intricate tangle of lives at the center of Late in the Day would feel like just such a self-satisfied riddle or, at best, like sly narrative machinations. Because this is Tessa Hadley, it instead feels earned and real and, even in its smallest nuances, important.... It's to her credit that Hadley manages to be old-fashioned and modernist and brilliantly postmodern all at once.... We've seen this before, and we've never seen this before, and it's spectacular.

—— New York Times Book Review

Utterly engrossing... Free Love is highly gratifying.

—— Ellen Peirson-Hagger , New Statesman

Free Love is a triumph.

—— Sarah Collins , Prospect

Brilliantly done... Hadley writes with devastating psychological insight, her prose spare and scalpel sharp. But she is also judiciously non-judgemental, a generous chronicler of the foibles and fears that mar and make a marriage.

—— Eithne Farry , Daily Express

Free Love is an absolute joy to read from a writer who never puts a word wrong. Fans of Small Pleasures will love it.

—— Sarra Manning , Red

[A] brilliant, sensual, seductively plotted new novel... Hadley has written an extraordinary story about love and transformation.

—— Independent

Free Love is often deeply perceptive and affecting... it lets you imagine what it was like to wrestle with old and new ways of thinking in an age that shaped (and continues to shape) our own.

—— Guy Stevenson , Literary Review

It's the 1960s and socialism, sex and nuclear anxiety have come crashing into the middle-class bubble Tessa Hadley novels usually operate so brilliant within.

—— The Times, *Summer Reads of 2022*

A story about change and its limits, its beautifully judged ending will bring you to tears.

—— Daily Mail, *Summer Reads of 2022*

[An] acutely realised, deeply humane novel... Unmissable.

—— Tablet, *Summer Reads of 2022*

No novel published this year gave me more pleasure than Tessa Hadley's Free Love.

—— New Statesman, *Books of the Year*

Nothing drew me in as conclusively as Free Love by Tessa Hadley, who is surely one of our most astute and deft observers of everyday lives.

—— New Statesman, *Books of the Year*

Hadley's novels continue to get better and better - and this is her finest, most pleasurable yet... it's near enough the perfect present in book form

—— Daily Mail, *Books of the Year*

She is, in all her mastery of the craft, a writer's writer.

—— Marie Claire
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