The Adult

Quotes

“All-consuming. The Adult has it all: betrayal, the intensity of inexperienced queer infatuation, and a perceptive and comic voice. A bright and poignant coming-of-age story that will leave you thinking, 'I hope Bronwyn Fischer writes more!’”
 —Emily Austin, author of Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead

"A haunting tale of love, heartbreak, and deceit. In precise, lyrical prose, Bronwyn Fischer captures Natalie’s growing pains in all their hilarity, devastation, and piercing tenderness. This is an electric debut."—Antonia Angress, author of Sirens & Muses

“Brilliant, a true original.”—Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of National Book Critics Circle Award finalist How to Pronounce Knife

“Bronwyn Fischer’s The Adult is a gorgeous daydream of a novel. In her immersive and lyrical prose, Fischer unravels a stunning portrait of a young woman’s queer sexual awakening. A tender and sometimes heartbreaking coming-of-age story, The Adult nevertheless shows us how profoundly we can grow when we move past shame and allow ourselves to be vulnerable to love and desire. I adore this book!”—Jennifer Savran Kelly, author of Endpapers

“[Reading The Adult], I enter a beautiful and beguiling world, in which Fischer’s sentences do what the best writing does: alter my way of seeing. The novel offers a deeply embodied sense of being eighteen in a new place, even as the narrator longs simultaneously to step into a new self. The unexpected perils and complexities of her journey are rendered with utmost specificity, offered to the reader with verve, heartbreak and comedy. This is the debut of an utterly original new voice."—Catherine Bush, author of Blaze Island

“This novel is that rare thing that combines profound feeling with the cool detachment and sharp insight of deep intelligence. A coming of age story, a school story, a coming out story, a morally dubious love story and a comic tragedy of modern manners, distractions and disastrous miscalculations, The Adult looks at moving to the city, finding love, finding sex, thinking you are older than you are, watching idiosyncratic videos on YouTube while having your heart broken, and getting out of your depth.”—Kate Cayley, playwright, poet, and author of How You Were Born, winner of the 2015 Trillium Book Award