Fire Exit: A Novel
A TIME, The New Yorker, ELLE, NPR, Harper’s Bazaar Best Book of the Year
Winner of the 2025 Housatonic Book Award
Finalist 2024 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the 2024 Maya Angelou Book Award
Shortlisted for the 2025 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award
Longlisted for the 2025 VCU Cabell First Novel Award, 2025 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
“Utterly consuming. . . . Fire Exit absolutely smolders.”―Tommy Orange
From the award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez, comes a masterful and unforgettable story of family, legacy, bloodlines, culture and inheritance, and what, if anything, we owe one another.
From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine’s Penobscot Reservation. He caught brief moments of his neighbor Elizabeth’s life―from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there’s something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from her and the rest of the tribal community. It’s the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep.
Now, it’s been weeks since he’s seen Elizabeth, and Charles is worried. As he attempts to hold on to and care for what he can―his home and property; his alcoholic and bighearted friend Bobby; and his mother, Louise, who is slipping deeper into dementia―he becomes increasingly haunted by his past. Forced to confront a lost childhood on the reservation, a love affair cut short, and the death of his beloved stepfather, Fredrick, Charles contends with questions he’s long been afraid to ask. Is his secret about Elizabeth his to share? And would his daughter want to know the truth, even if it could cost her everything she’s ever known?
Winner of the 2025 Housatonic Book Award
Finalist 2024 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the 2024 Maya Angelou Book Award
Shortlisted for the 2025 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award
Longlisted for the 2025 VCU Cabell First Novel Award, 2025 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
“Utterly consuming. . . . Fire Exit absolutely smolders.”―Tommy Orange
From the award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez, comes a masterful and unforgettable story of family, legacy, bloodlines, culture and inheritance, and what, if anything, we owe one another.
From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine’s Penobscot Reservation. He caught brief moments of his neighbor Elizabeth’s life―from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there’s something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from her and the rest of the tribal community. It’s the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep.
Now, it’s been weeks since he’s seen Elizabeth, and Charles is worried. As he attempts to hold on to and care for what he can―his home and property; his alcoholic and bighearted friend Bobby; and his mother, Louise, who is slipping deeper into dementia―he becomes increasingly haunted by his past. Forced to confront a lost childhood on the reservation, a love affair cut short, and the death of his beloved stepfather, Fredrick, Charles contends with questions he’s long been afraid to ask. Is his secret about Elizabeth his to share? And would his daughter want to know the truth, even if it could cost her everything she’s ever known?
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Community Reviews
Charles is a white man who lives outside of the Penobscot reservation in Maine where he grew up with his mother and step-father. After his father dies, he can no longer live on the reservation, so his step-father buys land and builds a house for him nearby. Although he is not a Native American he grew up on the reservation, was educated in their schools, and had friends there. Gizos is a childhood friend and Mary is a lover who has his child, Elizabeth. This is a story about alcoholism, dementia, dealing with chronic depression, life on a reservation, and friendship. I found this book incredibly sad and the characters unappealing.
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