On Sale Now
A propulsive and daring new novel by the author of Very Nice about a woman on the run from catastrophe, searching for love, home, a swimming pool, and for someone who can perhaps stop the bleeding from her head.
Allison Brody is thirty-two and newly arrived on the East Coast after just managing to flee her movie producer boyfriend. She has some money, saved up from years of writing and waitressing, and so she spends it, buying a small house on the beach. But then a Category 3 hurricane makes landfall and scatters her home up and down the shore, leaving Allison adrift.
Should she go home from the bar with the strange cameraman and stay in his guest room? Is that a glass vase he smashed on her skull? Can she wipe the blood from her eyes, get in her car, and drive to her mother’s? Does she really love the brain surgeon who saved her, or is she just using him for his swimming pool? And is it possible to ever truly heal without seeking some measure of revenge?
A gripping, provocative novel that walks a knife’s edge between comedy and horror, Hurricane Girl is the work of a singular talent, a novelist unafraid to explore the intersection of love, sex, violence, and freedom—while celebrating the true joy that can be found in a great swim and a good turkey sandwich.
Praise for Hurricane Girl
“The novel surprises us by blending visceral horror with laugh-out-loud humor. This unnerving stylistic collision is sustained throughout, as the concussed and bleeding protagonist manages to drive herself to her mother’s house in New Jersey, trying to feel grateful despite the hole in her head. 'She still had her health,' she thinks. 'That was what people liked to say…' Dermansky plays masterfully with perspective… The results are hilarious. Dermansky’s offbeat humor and spare prose make Allison’s mind a thrilling and wholly unusual place to be…. A wickedly entertaining read from first to last.”
—Aamina Ahmad, New York Times Book Review
“a subversively wry, post-Weinstein thriller”
—The New Yorker, Briefly Noted
"Dermansky uses economical prose to tell of 30-something Allison Brody, whose East Coast escape from an L.A. producer boyfriend goes pear-shaped when a storm destroys her new North Carolina home. Recovering from an operation to repair a hole in her head, Allison might also be in love with her surgeon. Allison is not OK, but Allison’s story is wickedly funny and wonderfully compact — paradoxically both satisfying and leaving you wanting more." —Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times
"With nimble prose, touches of dark humor, and flirtations with the surreal, Marcy Dermansky reaches deep into the wells of millennial discontent to reveal how confronting the past might provide an indecisive 30-something with her clearest path forward." —Omari Weekes, Vulture
“Marcy Dermansky is one of the most wildly original writers that I’ve ever read, and Hurricane Girl showcases what makes her so amazing. In tracking the unpredictable movements of a strange and hypnotic journey in the aftermath of a natural disaster, Dermansky nails the sensation of being alive, of navigating a world so strange that it’s almost a dream, of trying, again and again, to anchor yourself to a moment, to assure yourself that you exist, to withstand anything and somehow keep living.” –Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here