You Can't Stay Here Forever

A Novel

by Katherine Lin

On Sale: 06/13/2023

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You Can't Stay Here Forever

A Novel

by Katherine Lin

On Sale: 06/13/2023

Format:

Amazon Indigo

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About the Book

Desperate to obliterate her past, a young widow flees California for the French Riviera in this compelling debut, a tale of loss, rebirth, modern friendship, and romance that blends Sally Rooney’s wryness and psychological insight with Emma Straub's gorgeous scene-setting and rich relationships.

Just days after her young, handsome husband dies in a car accident, Ellie Huang discovers that he had a mistress—one of her own colleagues at a prestigious San Francisco law firm. Acting on impulse—or is it grief? rage? Probably all three—Ellie cashes in Ian’s life insurance policy for an extended stay at the luxurious Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, France. Accompanying her is her free-spirited best friend, Mable Chou.

Ellie hopes that the five-star resort on the French Riviera, with its stunning clientele and floral-scented cocktails, will be a heady escape from the real world. And at first it is. She and Mable meet an intriguing couple, Fauna and Robbie, and as their poolside chats roll into wine-soaked dinners, the four become increasingly intimate. But the sunlit getaway soon turns into a reckoning for Ellie, as long-simmering tensions and uncomfortable truths swirl to the surface.

Taking the reader from San Francisco to the gilded luxury of the south of France, You Can’t Stay Here Forever is a sharply funny and exciting debut that explores the slippery nature of marriage, the push and pull between friends, and the interplay of race and privilege, seen through the eyes of a young Asian American woman.

Critical Praise

"Katherine Lin's You Can't Stay Here Forever is compulsively readable, so much so that it's easy to overlook the astute intelligence that permeates every page. Reading this novel is like falling in love: delightful, poignant, and thrilling." — Jean Kwok, New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Translation and Searching for Sylvie Lee

“This glistening debut is filled with all the wanderlust, rage, and longing of early adulthood, and proves—in sinuous and Bacchic prose—that the dissolution of a friendship is a terrifying prospect.” — Courtney Maum, author of The Year of the Horses

“I was totally drawn in from the first page of You Can’t Stay Here Forever. All the contradictions of Ellie’s situation as the American child of East Asian immigrants are explored with empathy and nuance, and the book’s brilliantly observed, horribly recognizable moments are handled with the lightest of touches.” — Emily Itami, author of Fault Lines

"You Can't Stay Here Forever is a keen and expansive rumination on love, betrayal, and class set between the Bay Area and the South of France. A wry and exciting debut that while set in rarified luxury, portrays universal struggles of friendship, work and marriage." — Kathy Wang, author of Family Trust and Impostor Syndrome