Harmless Like You

Harmless Like You


Unabridged

Sale price $13.00 Regular price$25.99
Save 50.0%
Quantity:
window.theme = window.theme || {}; window.theme.preorder_products_on_page = window.theme.preorder_products_on_page || [];

“Buchanan’s prose is lyrical and evocative… [She] reminds us, the ethereal dreams of the 1960s shaped the all-too-solid contours of the world we inhabit today.”

New York Times Book Review


One of NPR’s Great Reads Selections

A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice

Winner of a Betty Trask Award

Winner of the 2017 Authors' Club Best First Novel Award

Written in startlingly beautiful prose, Harmless Like You is set across New York, Berlin, and Connecticut, following Yuki Oyama, a Japanese girl fighting to make it as an artist, and Yuki's son Jay who, as an adult in the present day, is forced to confront the mother who abandoned him when he was only two years old.

The novel opens when Yuki is sixteen and her father is posted back to Japan. Though she and her family have been living as outsiders in New York City, Yuki opts to stay, intoxicated by her friendship with the beautiful aspiring model Odile, the energy of the city, and her desire to become an artist. But when she becomes involved with an older man and the relationship turns destructive, Yuki's life is unmoored.

Harmless Like You is a suspenseful novel about the complexities of identity, art, adolescent friendships, and familial bonds, which asks—and ultimately answers—how does a mother desert her son?