Porcupines - by Fran Fabriczki (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

For fans of Gilmore Girls and Gary Shteyngart, a sharp and brilliantly observed debut set across Southern California, with stops in DC and Budapest, about a young single mother and her increasingly inquisitive daughter, who wakes up one day and decides to find out who her father is.

Los Angeles, 2001. Sonia is a single mother who spends her time running away from PTA moms, engaging in not-quite-illegal business activities involving rich Eastern Europeans and high-tech gadgets, and raising her beloved Milosh, Mila. Cast in her mother's image, Mila is a precocious, intelligent girl with a burgeoning Shostakovich obsession. The pair live an unconventional life and are, all in all, quite happy together. But Sonia's guarded life and refusal to discuss their family has left Mila lonely and isolated. When she stumbles across emails between her mother and an unknown man, Mila's curiosity about her father leads her to form a plan, putting into motion a chain of events that will cause their carefully constructed lives to implode.

Flashback to 1990. The world has begun to breathe again after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Eighteen-year-old Szonja Imre travels to visit her sister in LA in search of the quintessential adventure in the "land of the free." What she doesn't expect is the discovery that her sister Rina's conception of the American dream is vastly different from hers--a lot less Hollywood and more, as Szonja eloquently puts it, "Jewish Stepford Wife." Rina finds freedom in reconnecting with her roots, but Szonja can't see how Rina's new life is less restricted than the one she left behind in Budapest. Their disparate lifestyles lead to conflict, and when Szonja ends up in a difficult situation, she makes a series of snap decisions that leave her navigating America alone as an illegal immigrant.

Taking place across Budapest in the years preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall, DC in the thick of cold war politics, and the bright sunshine of retro LA, Porcupines captures the rich, complex, and entirely absorbing relationships between sisters, mothers, and daughters. At its heart, it is a book about all the ways we find community and companionship, sometimes in the unlikeliest of places.

Review Quotes

"A dazzling mother-daughter story, Porcupines shows us the softness that lies beneath the spikes as an eccentric single mother tries to hide her past from her increasingly curious daughter. A witty and tender debut."--Jenny Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Pineapple Street

"Fran Fabriczki's spectacular debut novel Porcupines is destined to become an instant classic. Hollywood! Budapest! The Berlin Wall! A goulash made of diamonds, pearls and gold!"--Adriana Trigiani, bestselling author of The View From Lake Como

"Funny, ascerbic, and wonderfully playful, Porcupines is a brilliant, cross-generational portrait of an immigrant family constantly assailed by whether they are American enough, Hungarian enough or Jewish enough. It's completely delicious: a novel to sink into." --Naomi Wood, author of Mrs. Hemingway

"A haunting, funny and compulsively readable novel about the intricacies of family, loss and trust." --Chloe Caldwell, author of Women

"If Gilmore Girls had sharper edges and came with a Los Angeles sunburn, you'd have this riveting novel, a love letter to kids who are done keeping their parents' secrets." --Courtney Maum, author of I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You

About the Author

Fran Fabriczki was born in Budapest and lived in Los Angeles for many years as a child. She moved to the United Kingdom to study English at the University of Cambridge. Porcupines is her first novel.