HER HERE

In this lyrical and moving debut, one lost young woman goes in search of another, and finds even more questions about her own identity. Elena, the narrator of Her Here, struggles with a traumatic loss that has distanced her from herself and the vivacity with which she used to live. When an estranged family friend in Paris makes her a bizarre proposition, Elena finds herself accepting, embracing the opportunity to put her old life on hold and escape the powerlessness she feels.

Leaving behind graduate school and her long-term relationship in the USA, Elena moves to Paris to delve into the journals of a young woman, Ella, who went missing six years earlier in Thailand. Elena takes on the task of rewriting Ella's journals into a coherent story about how and why Ella vanished. Soon, Elena's obsession with understanding her own past (and future) becomes muddled with the need to understand Ella. By exploring the mystery of Ella's disappearance and writing from Ella's point of view, Elena's sense of self becomes further unmoored, leading her dangerously close to losing her own identity entirely.

Her Here weaves an existential detective story with an immersive plotline, distinctive characters, and an abundance of suspense. It explores the intergenerational bonds between women -- mothers, daughters, lovers, friends -- and how we create ourselves in relation to those around us. Flowing back and forth between Elena's experiences in the labyrinthine streets of Paris and Ella's life in the villages of Thailand, Amanda Dennis takes readers on a striking and powerful journey. Her Here is a deeply felt, intimate portrayal of young women traveling and becoming themselves, with all the perils and pain inherent in that process of discovery.

Amanda Dennis studied modern languages at Princeton and Cambridge Universities before earning her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was awarded a Whited Fellowship in creative writing. An avid traveler, she has lived in six countries, including Thailand, where she spent a year as a Princeton in Asia fellow. She has written about literature for the Los Angeles Review of Books and Guernica, and she is assistant professor of comparative literature and creative writing at the American University of Paris, where she is researching the influence of 20th-century French philosophy on the work of Samuel Beckett. Her Here is her first novel.