Starling Days: A Novel

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Overview

Set in New York and London and shortlisted for the Costa Novel Prize and a selection of the Nervous Breakdown Book Club, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Starling Days is a stunningly observed and unflinching yet tender novel that interrogates the relationship between mental illness and love.

Mina is staring over the edge of the George Washington Bridge when a patrol car drives up. She tries to convince the officers she’s not about to jump, but they don’t believe her. Her husband, Oscar, is called to pick her up.

Oscar hopes that leaving New York City for a few months will give Mina the space to heal, so they move to London, to Oscar’s oldest friends and an apartment wallpapered with indigo-eyed birds, near a canal and flower market. Mina, a classicist, works on her book about mythological women and searches for solutions to her failing mental health by pondering their lives. Penelope, Psyche, Leda . . . They all survived, didn’t they've Even Iphigenia, in one of the tellings. Mina finally finds a beam of light in Phoebe, a real-life woman, and Oscar and Mina’s complicated love is tested.

A gorgeously wrought novel, variously about love, mythology, mental illness, and the times we need to seek out milder psychological climates, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Starling Days is a complex and compelling work of fiction by a singularly gifted writer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781419751653
Publisher:	The Overlook Press
Publication date:	04/13/2021
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	685,805
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is an American and British writer. She received her BA from Columbia and her MFA from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first novel, Harmless Like You, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and NPR Great Read. She is the editor of the Go Home! anthology, and her work has appeared in Granta, Guernica, the Guardian, and the Paris Review.

Editorial Reviews

Readers willing to brave the darkness will find a worthy, nuanced portrait of a woman’s struggle for self-determination amid mental illness.”—Publisher's Weekly

“A gripping, tender, and unsettling look at mental illness... Poetic and understated, this nuanced work by Buchanan also addresses adult-child relationships, the legacy of family trauma, and the challenge of offering unconditional love...Complex and resonant.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Starling Days is unlike anything I’ve ever read. Both quiet and scorching, this is a story about mental health, desire, and the myriad mythologies we both build and destroy. Rowan Hisayo Buchanan has offered us another supreme gift of a novel, a rare opportunity to love and forgive our darkest and most shimmering selves.”—T. Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“Starling Days a beautiful and profoundly moving “floor plan” of what it means to live with depression and dailiness, love and death, solitude and connection.”—Elaine Castillo, author of America Is Not the Heart

“A singular novel from the poetic and painterly mind of Rowan Hisayo Buchanan.”—Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti

“A quiet triumph—tenderly and disarmingly exploring the responsibility of love, loneliness, what it is to feel lost.”—Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure

“The gifted Rowan Hisayo Buchanan follows her marvelous debut with Starling Days... portraying complex character and tangled interpersonal relations with striking maturity.”—Financial Times

“An exquisite rendering of love, sadness, and misunderstanding...I want to share this book with everyone I know.”—Spencer Quong, Paris Review, most anticipated titles of 2020

“Everyone could use a change of scenery — and nobody more than Oscar and Mina, a married couple who leave New York for London after Mina's second suicide attempt. But a trek across the pond can't keep some old baggage away.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Buchanan’s second novel tenderly explores mental illness, bisexuality, connection, love and loss. This is an original, poetic and striking literary triumph."—Ms. Magazine

“In this heartfelt book about a struggling young couple, Buchanan surfaces the many ways in which love can be complicated.”—Buzzfeed

From the Publisher

In this heartfelt book about a struggling young couple, Buchanan surfaces the many ways in which love can be complicated.

Buzzfeed

02/24/2020

Buchanan (Harmless Like You) traces the strain of depression on a marriage in this bleak and eloquent novel. Six months after 32-year-old classicist Mina Umeda marries her boyfriend of 10 years, she walks pensively across the George Washington Bridge amid a depressive episode. Confronted by the police, she’s unable to convince them she was just clearing her head. Oscar, her Japanese-British husband, picks her up and suggests they go to London to distract her from her depression. There, she ruminates on an unfinished project about Greco-Roman myths titled The Women Who Survived. When Mina’s decision to go off her antidepressants and birth control exacerbates her illness, Oscar grows casually cruel in his frustration (“Nobody gets the life they thought they would”). He returns to New York City while Mina embarks on an affair with Phoebe, the sister of Oscar’s best friend. After Mina’s frantic fixation on Phoebe begins to push her away, Oscar returns to London and the married couple struggles forward. Buchanan sharply observes the confusing sensations of depression (“Sometimes I want to die and sometimes I want to buy a box of tomatoes and stand by the fridge eating them out of a paper carton”). Readers willing to brave the darkness will find a worthy, nuanced portrait of a woman’s struggle for self-determination amid mental illness. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Starling Days is unlike anything I’ve ever read. Both quiet and scorching, this is a story about mental health, desire, and the myriad mythologies we both build and destroy. Rowan Hisayo Buchanan has offered us another supreme gift of a novel, a rare opportunity to love and forgive our darkest and most shimmering selves.

author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls - T. Kira Madden

The gifted Rowan Hisayo Buchanan follows her marvelous debut with Starling Days... portraying complex character and tangled interpersonal relations with striking maturity.

Financial Times

An exquisite rendering of love, sadness, and misunderstanding...I want to share this book with everyone I know.

Paris Review, most anticipated titles of 2020 - Spencer Quong

Everyone could use a change of scenery — and nobody more than Oscar and Mina, a married couple who leave New York for London after Mina's second suicide attempt. But a trek across the pond can't keep some old baggage away.

Entertainment Weekly

“Starling Days a beautiful and profoundly moving “floor plan” of what it means to live with depression and dailiness, love and death, solitude and connection.

author of America Is Not the Heart - Elaine Castillo

A quiet triumph—tenderly and disarmingly exploring the responsibility of love, loneliness, what it is to feel lost.

author of The Water Cure - Sophie Mackintosh

A singular novel from the poetic and painterly mind of Rowan Hisayo Buchanan.

author of Ponti - Sharlene Teo

Buchanan’s second novel tenderly explores mental illness, bisexuality, connection, love and loss. This is an original, poetic and striking literary triumph."

Ms. Magazine

★ 2020-01-13
Depression, like other psychiatric conditions, is often treated as a personal failure, a refusal to pull oneself together and do what's needed.

Oscar is at his wit's end. Although he and Mina have been together for 10 years, the deterioration of his wife's mental health has left him baffled. On the surface everything is fine: They finally married six months ago, and while Mina's academic career is floundering, he has a decent job working with his dad. What's more, they have a nice-enough Manhattan apartment and plenty of friends. Why, then, did Mina gulp a handful of pills on their wedding night? And why, barely six months later, did police remove her from a ledge on the George Washington Bridge? As Oscar grapples with his wife's ostensible death wish, he is offered a chance to work in London for a few months. Thinking that a change of scene will benefit Mina, the pair upend their lives, sublet their NYC apartment, and move. Not surprisingly, their troubles follow them across the Atlantic, and when Oscar is summoned back to the U.S. for an emergency business meeting, he is forced to leave Mina alone; although a phone app is supposed to track her movements, it doesn't. What follows is a gripping, tender, and unsettling look at mental illness. Mina's impulsiveness and obsessive behaviors, seemingly illogical, are sympathetically drawn. So, too, is Oscar's desire to run head-on into more stable surroundings, far from depressive disorders and suicidal ideation. Poetic and understated, this nuanced work by Buchanan (Harmless Like You, 2017) also addresses adult-child relationships, the legacy of family trauma, and the challenge of offering unconditional love.

Complex and resonant.

Kirkus Reviews