Kelly Luce’s debut novel now available from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

One of Elle’s 33 Best Books of 2016

Part mystery, part adventure story, part meditation on the darkness we each carry inside, Pull Me Under is the story of a Japanese-American woman who, as a 12-year-old child in Japan, snapped and killed her bully. She starts a new life as an adult in Boulder, Colorado, and tells no one—including her husband or daughter—of her past. Her estranged father is a mythological figure, a virtuoso violinist who is a Living National Treasure in Japan; his death spurs her return to Japan for the first time in twenty years.

Hana Sasaki

Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail will introduce you to many things—among them, an oracular toaster, a woman who grows a tail, and an extraordinary sex-change operation.

  • Wastes no time in grabbing our attention.

    - The New York Times on Pull Me Under

  • Luce's debut will bewitch you.

    - O, the Oprah magazine

  • Luce knows how to end her story, and does so satisfyingly... it is similar to the procession of a good, long hike.

    The Chicago Tribune on Pull Me Under

  • A suspense novel with a female protagonist that gets more right about women than so many others I've read in the past few years.

    NPR on Pull Me Under

  • A revelatory family mystery.

    Elle on Pull Me Under

  • Luce deftly evokes Japan without exoticizing it...the final act is the novel’s strongest and most confident, weaving the book’s threads together and leaving a lasting reverberation.

    - Publishers Weekly on Pull Me Under

  • Pull Me Under is a strange and very appealing novel, a journey to Japan and the primal scene of the main character's self— which, like a volcano, may have already blown its top.

    - Rachel Kushner

  • Pull Me Under is a fierce and suspenseful exploration of the profoundly mysterious nature of identity, written with precise and spectacular beauty. Kelly Luce is one of our most thrilling new talents.

    - Laura van den Berg

  • Luce has created a collection in which the donning of soft skins, naked or furred, is both an act of love and an expression of the unremitting strangeness of the self.

    - The Chicago Tribune on Hana Sasaki