“I love, love, love If You Follow Me. It’s

fearlessly honest, occasionally heartbreaking, and extremely funny, and I can’t

In Malena Watrous' beautifully

wrought and deftly written debut novel, we meet Marina, a young woman who has

come to the small, rural Japanese town of Shika to teach English for a year. For

her, Shika is more than just her home as a “temporary person.” It’s also an

attempt to escape the reality that has followed her since her father committed

suicide only a year earlier.

Marina is a big city girl is in a

small town filled with off-beat characters, including an ambitious town

matchmaker, a dentist looking for free English lessons, a high school student who

idolizes Western rap artists, and finally Marina’s America-obsessed supervisor,

Hiro, a town leader whose friendship teaches her more than she ever expected.

If You Follow Me is

at once a fish-out-of-water tale, a dark comedy of manners, and a strange kind

of love story that explores the tension of being the outsider in an intimate

community and the joy in finding that human nature is the same everywhere.