*NATIONAL BESTSELLER* *Indigenous Voices Award winner* *Amazon First Novel Award winner* *Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction* *Named a Globe and Mail and CBC Best Book of the Year*
From the bestselling author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground comes a mind-bending, gripping novel about Native life, motherhood and mental health that follows a young Mohawk woman who discovers that the picture-perfect life she always hoped for may have horrifying consequences.
On the surface, Alice is exactly where she should be. She's just given birth to a beautiful baby girl, Dawn; her charming husband, Steve, is nothing but supportive; and they've recently moved to a wealthy neighborhood in Toronto. And yet, Alice feels like an imposter. She isn't connecting with Dawn, a struggle made even more difficult by the recent loss of her mother, and every waking moment is spent hiding her despair from her watchful white neighbors. Her growing self-doubt hinders the one vestige of her old life she has left: her goal of writing a modern retelling of the Haudenosaunee creation story.
At first, Alice is convinced her discomfort is of her own making, but then strange things start happening. She finds herself losing bits of time, hearing voices she can't explain, and speaking with things that should not be talking back to her, all while her neighbors' passive-aggressive behavior begins to morph into something far more threatening. Though Steve assures her this is all in her head, Alice cannot fight the feeling that something is very, very wrong, and that in her creation story lies the key to her and Dawn's survival. . . . She just has to finish it before it's too late.
Told in Alice's darkly funny voice, And Then She Fell is an urgent and unflinching look at inherited trauma, womanhood, denial, and false allyship, which speeds to an unpredictable—and surreal—climax.
ALICIA ELLIOTT is a Mohawk writer and editor living in Brantford, Ontario. She has written for The Globe and Mail, CBC, Hazlitt and many other publications. She's had numerous essays nominated for National Magazine Awards, winning Gold in 2017 and an honorable mention in 2020. Her short fiction was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2018 (by Roxane Gay), Best Canadian Stories 2018, and The Journey Prize Stories 30. Alicia was chosen by Tanya Talaga as the 2018 recipient of the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award. Her first book, A Mind Spread Out On The Ground, was a national bestseller in Canada. It was also nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction and won the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award.
"And Then She Fell is at once engrossing and profound, terrifying and empathetic. Like The Bell Jar, it sheds new light on the trope of the mad woman, laying bare the million blows it takes to leave a person unhinged." —The Walrus
"And Then She Fell has drawn apt comparisons to Jordan Peele’s film Get Out. . . . The redemptive, heart-rending final act of the novel bends space and time to consider "the connection and love that slides between all hardship and gives even the toughest life humor, meaning, heart, heft"—flawed and damaged people still reach out their arms to catch one another when they fall." —Quill & Quire
"The mind of Alicia Elliott is a fascinating place to visit . . . [And Then She Fell] is a damn good read!" —The Globe and Mail
"This novel is part time travel and part horror, as full of heart as it is bold." —Publishers Weekly
"A tale of injustice and veiled persecution seen through a fevered imagination." —Kirkus Reviews
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