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Set in rural, poverty-stricken North Carolina, this "beautiful, gritty, and piercing" novel follows two young women--best friends--as they "journey through the highs and lows of friendship, love, and addiction," perfect for readers of Julie Buntin's Marlena (Erika Carter, author of Lucky You).
Irene, a lonely nineteen-year-old in rural North Carolina, works long nights at the local pool hall, serving pitchers and dodging drunks. One evening, her hilarious, magnetic coworker Luce invites her on a joy ride through the mountains to take revenge on a particularly creepy customer. Their adventure not only spells the beginning of a dazzling friendship, it seduces both girls into the mysterious world of pills and the endless hustles needed to fund the next high.
Together, Irene and Luce run nickel-tossing scams at the county fair and trick dealers into trading legit pharms for birth-control pills. Everything is wild and wonderful until Luce finds a boyfriend who wants to help her get clean. Soon the two of them decide to move away and start a new, sober life in Florida--leaving Irene behind.
Told in a riveting dialogue between the girls' addicted past and their hopes for a better future, Bewilderness is not just a brilliant, funny, heartbreaking novel about opioid abuse, it's also a moving look at how intense, intimate friendships can shape every young woman's life.
"Tucker astonishes in her devastating debut, a harrowing account of addiction, friendship, and loss...This is a stunning accomplishment." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Raw, powerful, and unflinching, the novel immerses readers in the minute-by-minute mindset of addiction. Tucker skillfully flips between past and present, swapping the language of sobriety for the slang of active addiction to give readers a full picture of the pair's mental state. A natural fit for fans of Julie Buntin's Marlena, Tucker's novel champions the strength it takes to stay clean when every other decision is so much simpler." - Booklist (starred review)
"This debut novel is filled with sharp, vivid descriptions of back roads and seedy meet-ups...Absorbing and unflinching." - Kirkus Reviews
"Tinglingly relevant." - Library Journal
"Karen Tucker puts a human face on this ongoing public health catastrophe, as she tells the story of Irene and Luce, pill-addicts and best friends. More than merely evoking the desperation of opioid abuse, Bewilderness provides a funny and touching story of female friendship." – The Millions
"Karen Tucker's debut novel Bewilderness captures the relentless tug of addiction--to a person, to a substance, to a feeling--with wrenching honesty and insight. This fierce, heartbreaking story of female friendship and loss--narrated by the wise, sharply funny Irene--had me riveted from the first page. Read it, read it, read it." - Julie Buntin, author of Marlena
"This is a heartrending novel about addiction, love, and fragile starts, and it held me captive with its deft pacing and attention to detail. Tucker shows how the world is made up of small, unheralded stories--of great loves and senseless losses--and her novel sets out, and succeeds, to make us feel one of them." - Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State
"Karen Tucker has the chaotic truth-telling energy of a sage and a lack of sentimentality that would give Hunter S. Thompson stomach cramps. This is the novel the opiate epidemic needs." - Rufi Thorpe, author of The Knockout Queen and The Girls from Corona Del Mar
This information about Bewilderness was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Karen Tucker was born and raised in North Carolina. Her fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Yale Review Online, Tin House, Boulevard, Epoch, and elsewhere. She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains with her partner and multiple cats.
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