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February 2024 Indie Next List
“Emily Austin is the author for lesbian stories that explore mental health issues! Her writing is so funny, and relatable, I want to absolutely devour every word she’s written. I love Enid and I know queer women everywhere will too!”
— Hannah Cloutier, The Bookery Manchester, Manchester, NH
Description
A fast-paced, hilarious, and ultimately hopeful novel for anyone who has ever worried they might be a terrible person—from the bestselling author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead.
Enid is obsessed with space. She can tell you all about black holes and their ability to spaghettify you without batting an eye in fear. Her one major phobia? Bald men. But she tries to keep that one under wraps. When she’s not listening to her favorite true crime podcasts on a loop, she’s serially dating a rotation of women from dating apps. At the same time, she’s trying to forge a new relationship with her estranged half-sisters after the death of her absent father. When she unwittingly plunges into her first serious romantic entanglement, Enid starts to believe that someone is following her.
As her paranoia spirals out of control, Enid must contend with her mounting suspicion that something is seriously wrong with her. Because at the end of the day there’s only one person she can’t outrun—herself.
Brimming with quirky humor, charm, and heart, Interesting Facts about Space effortlessly shows us the power of revealing our secret shames, the most beautifully human parts of us all.
About the Author
Emily Austin is the author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, Interesting Facts About Space, and the poetry collection Gay Girl Prayers. She was born in Ontario, Canada, and received two writing grants from the Canadian Council for the Arts. She studied English literature and library science at Western University. She currently lives in Ottawa, in the territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation.
Praise For…
"Enid is an eccentric, lovable, wonderfully sex-positive heroine, and we were right there with her even when her story went from feeling like a heartwarming rom-com to a potential spy thriller. This is a funny, tender, and relatable read that also includes lots of fascinating facts about the universe!" —Apple Books
“Interesting Facts About Space glows with macabre humor, neuroses, and charming wit, making for yet another softhearted queer novel by Austin.” —Jill Gutowitz, author of Girls Can Kiss Now
"Interesting Facts about Space is a terrifically beguiling mixture of the comical, the surreal and the moving. Emily Austin, the queen of darkly quirky, endearingly flawed heroines, has created a wonderful character in Enid, a woman who’s found her own idiosyncratic way of navigating a world of weird people and events (which may or may not be coloured by her imagination). Emily's writing has a clarity and directness that illuminates the novel from start to finish. Full of wit and wisdom, Interesting Facts about Space is a testament to the power of confronting the messy truth of life, however tempting it is to retreat into the soothing sanctuary of impersonal facts. A joy to read." —SARAH HAYWOOD, author of The Cactus
"If you've read Emily Austin's debut, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, you'll love this charming, heartfelt follow-up. If you haven't read her debut, I'm jealous: everything Austin writes is swoonworthy, full of lovely humans struggling to find meaning, love, and belonging in a world that's too often cold. Enid is a marvel." —ANDREW MACDONALD, author of When We Were Vikings
"Wow, just wow. Emily Austin gets better and better! Interesting Facts About Space is a delightful, big-hearted book that made me laugh and think about all the ways in which we convince ourselves we’re too weird for this world—and yet it’s the most human thing anyone can do. An absolute charmer of a novel!" —MAI NGUYEN, author of Sunshine Nails
"Emily Austin is the patron saint of Sad Girls With Too Many Feelings, and masterful at finding and revealing the universal story in an achingly specific situation." —NORA MCINERNY, author of Bad Vibes Only
"Emily Austin has done it again! I love how her quirky dark humor reveals both the absurdity and relatability of the human condition. Enid is undoubtedly a charmingly eccentric Emily Austin™ protagonist: her greatest fear is bald men, her love language is sharing interesting facts about space, her coping mechanism is listening to true crime podcasts, and her secret is that she thinks she has a parasite that makes her a bad person. Fellow parasite-host readers will be both entertained and consoled by where the story goes." —CELIA LASKEY, author of So Happy For You
"Dark humor has so much to teach us about the beauty and absurdity of the human condition, and the risk this book’s charming heroine takes to open her fragile and flawed self to love contains a life lesson for us all." —COURTNEY MAUM, author of The Year of the Horses
Interesting Facts About Space is among other things, a vibrantly paranoid mystery and an unexpected love story. Emily Austin creates beguilingly eccentric characters, especially true crime addict and outer space encyclopedia Enid, who’s both oddly confident and yearning to disappear. Interesting Facts About Space is highly original, engrossing and hauntingly entertaining. —PAUL RUDNICK, author of Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style
"A complicated, layered exploration of how bullying, fear, and a desperate desire to fit in have lasting effects." —Kirkus