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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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ATOMIC HEARTS

Megan Cummins

A Novel

In Megan Cummins's debut novel ATOMIC HEARTS a woman reflects on the explosive summer of secrets she faced at sixteen when she betrayed the friend closest to her and moved in with her father, who we discover is on a drug addicted slippery slope.

Gertie has a way of forcing her independence on people she meets, and yet she's often too scared to be true to herself or say no when she knows she should. Sixteen and living in a Michigan town that feels a lot like nowhere, Gertie is harboring a secret heavy enough to fracture her closest friendship. She and Cindy Fellows are BFFs for as long as they can remember, bonded by trampoline vinyl, pilfered vodka, and by the fact that their fathers are addicts. When Gertie sees a chance to escape a potential hometown drama of her doing, she decides to join her recovering father in Sioux Falls for the summer, but drama finds her there, too..parties without curfews, boys without boundaries, a compromising photo, tragedy back home . . . and her father, teetering on the edge. Her sole refuge is the fantasy novel she's writing, a portal to another world and the story of a young girl roaming a strange land, trusting her wits to survive. Years later, when ghosts of the past surface, Gertie decides to write again about that fateful, explosive summer, now from the stabler shores of adulthood. Powered by the fierce imagination of her youth, Gertie finally allows herself the grace to move boldly into the future by telling a version of her story that she always hoped would be true.At the end of the book there is a note that reveals the story is semi-autobiographical. Megan Cumminsis the author of IF THE BODY ALLOWS IT (University of Nebraska Press, 2021),awarded the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction and longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. (We do have a nice page of praise for the stories so if you're interested, let us know.) Her stories and essays have appeared inA Public Space,Guernica,One Teen Story,Ninth Letter,Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She edits atPublic Books, a magazine of arts, ideas, and scholarship. Cummins was the longtime managing editor ofA Public Space,winner of the inaugural Whiting Literary Magazine Award. MS: Aug 24 #debut #women fiction

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Book Published 2025-08-05 by Ballantine HC

Comments

A nuclear blast to the emotional core . . . Part teenage summer fling, part family tragedy, Megan Cummins's debut is the most exquisitely written, bighearted journey into friendship, addiction, and the frustrations that come with parenting our parents. With sentences sharp enough to cut, dialogue that will make you laugh out loud, and a story that will break your heart open again and again, Atomic Hearts is the kind of novel that will send you scrambling for your phone to call your best friend, your mom, your dad, and let them know how much they matter.

Brilliant . . . explores the long path to self-fulfillment, how we discover our place in the world, and what we owe to others along the way. . . . Megan Cummins uncovers the troubling, intricate mystery of human connection, how we survive the worst of it, and sometimes don't. She lays bare how we manage, despite enormous hurdles, to collapse the remote distances between us, and how each of us is a portal to worlds unseen.

A live scroll on love, loyalty, who we are in our wrongdoings, and how we end up with the one we end up with . . . Cummins captures all her characters in their wide and earnest humanness. This novel sustains the empathy it calls for and reminds us that one need not be a saint to achieve redemption. I closed the book at the end, but my heart was still open.

An exquisite first novel about the body's fragility, the spirit's opacity, and the elastic absolution of narrative. Megan Cummins's restless, devoted protagonista young writer working toward something like truth in the shadows of her father's addiction, and in friendship's frank lightis the kind of protagonist I'll find myself thinking of years later, as of a good friend: 'I should call Gertie.