Indies Introduce

Fiction

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  Lights All Night Long, Lydia Fitzpatrick
  Penguin Press, 9780525558736, April 2, 2019 (Fiction)
  

   

  “Fifteen-year-old Ilya is torn between two worlds: the deep South where he lives with his fundamentalist student exchange hosts and the drug-infested underworld of his native Russia. A tautly strung story that is part murder mystery, part love story, but wholly memorable, with well-drawn characters.”

  Grace Harper, Mac’s Backs (Cleveland, OH)
  
  

   

  “Exchange student Ilya has just arrived in the balmy heat of Louisiana from the frozen tundra of Russia. For Ilya, who is smart, hardworking, and thoughtful, this journey was to be the opportunity of a lifetime. But he can’t seem leave his home behind, or the brother he would do anything to save. In Lights all Night Long, Lydia Fitzpatrick juggles a coming-of-age tale, a murder mystery, and social commentary on addiction, drug use, and corruption. And it works. Beautifully. She somehow manages to avoid all the predictable tropes of each to create this sparkling world full of hope, friendship, and the power of family in all its forms.”

  Erin Ball, Third Place Books (Lake Forest Park, WA)
  

   

  “Where to start with the luminous, surprising, thoroughly entrancing Lights All Night Long? Lydia Fitzpatrick’s debut stuns from the first sentence, when 15-year-old Russian exchange student Ilya arrives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and notes that the airport smells like toothpaste. Ilya struggles to make sense of his new home in suburban, evangelical America and grapples with the Russia he left behind—specifically the murky adolescence that saw his brother Vladimir descend into drugs and, allegedly, murder. Country and family, love and loyalty, addiction and violence, plus pure teenage coming-of-age: you won’t read anything else like this all year.”

  Emilie Sommer, East City Bookshop (Washington, DC)