You Are Free to Go

by Sarah Yaw

Overview

Moses and Jorge will never leave the maximum security prison. Outside its walls, Gina, Shell, and Ellen will never escape its influence, or the way it tethers them to one another. When Jorge dies in his cell, lives within and beyond the prison walls are upended, testing the boundaries we all draw to keep the good in, the hurtful out.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938126215
Publisher:	Engine Books
Publication date:	09/16/2014
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Sarah Yaw's novel You Are Free To Go was selected by Robin Black as the winner of the 2013 Engine Books Novel Prize. Sarah received an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College, and is an assistant professor at Cayuga Community College. She lives and writes in Central New York.

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the 2013 Engine Books Novel Prize.

"A trio of faltering young women, each still tethered to the local prison, an inmate rapidly approaching his end-all live inside these pages with haunting, visceral persuasiveness. Dreamlike and startling, You Are Free to Go is poised between the imagined ether and bloody reality, but Sarah Yaw never flinches."

-Michelle Wildgen, author of Bread and Butter and You're Not You

"Sarah Yaw's You Are Free to Go presents a large-scale tragedy of the highest order. Its brutal, authentic account of despairing men in prison is haunting on every page. It is terrifying and heartbreaking in its multiple portrayals of the hungering for freedom experienced by family members on the outside. As you read this remarkable novel you will feel you have actually touched the characters' most unrelenting, life-stealing fears-and you will understand the survival of hope occurring when their love endures despite their fears."

-Kevin McIlvoy, author of Hyssop

From the Publisher

2014-07-24
The death of a prison lifer reverberates both within and outside the walls in Yaw's debut novel. Moses and Jorge both committed murder young, and they've been incarcerated for decades in grim Hardenberg Correctional Facility. But amid the brutalities and harsh, hypermasculine codes of prison, these cellmates and friends have carved out a kind of uneasy peace for themselves. Tough-minded, impulsive Moses is entrusted with cellblock mail delivery, and as the novel begins, he's pursuing his intellectual ambitions by taking a course in literature, with help from the civilian employee who supervises the mail. He's the caged-cat sort of prisoner, smart but profoundly damaged, and he relies on Jorge to keep him calm and in some semblance of control; the older man is his mentor, his mollifier and his spur to continued conscience. Gentle and ever more frail, Jorge tends tamed songbirds in his cell and adores his daughter, Gina, who's managed to get an Ivy League education and a plum job (avec Emmy) in network news. But his mind is failing, and sometimes now, horrifyingly, he can't distinguish between Gina and the girl he strangled all those years ago. When, one night, Jorge hangs himself, his death throws Moses into the kind of grief-stricken mental and moral disarray that, in a setting like Hardenberg, has quick, drastic consequences. Meanwhile, outside the walls, we see the way that Jorge's passing—as well as regret and anguish and separation in all their forms—affects both his daughter and her wealthier, more privileged friends Shell and Ellen. The scenes of prison life—like the harrowing late-novel moment when Moses entertains his first face-to-face visitor in 35 years—are compelling, but the book is more diffuse and less persuasive in the storylines set outside. All in all, an intriguing debut.

Kirkus Reviews