Listen free for 30 days
Listen with offer
-
We Can Only Save Ourselves
- Narrated by: Jesse Vilinsky
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
£0.00 for first 30 days
Buy Now for £13.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Summary
One of Newsweek, Bustle, and LitHub's most anticipated books and Goodreads' Debut Novels to Discover in 2021.
We Can Only Save Ourselves is the story of one teenage girl’s unlikely indoctrination and the reverberations in the tight-knit community she leaves behind.
Alice Lange’s neighbours are proud to know her - a high-achieving student, cheerleader and all-around good citizen, she’s a perfect emblem of their sunny neighbourhood. The night before she’s expected to be crowned homecoming queen, though, she commits an act of vandalism, then disappears, following a magnetic stranger named Wesley to a bungalow in another part of the state. There, he promises, Alice can be her true self, shedding the shackles of conformity.
At the bungalow, however, she learns that four other young women seeking enlightenment and adventure have already followed him there. Her new lifestyle is intoxicating at first, but as Wesley’s demands on all of them increase, the house becomes a pressure cooker - until one day, they reach the point of no return.
Back home, the story of Alice’s disappearance and radicalisation is framed by the first-person plural chorus of the mothers who knew her before, who worry about her, but also resent the tear she made in the fabric of their perfect world, one that exposes the question: isn’t suburbia a kind of cult unto itself?
Combining the sharp social critique of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere with the elegiac beauty of Emma Cline’s The Girls, this is a fierce literary debut from a writer to watch.