HESTER

Dark and ironic debut novel about female rage.

The eponymous Hester is a seemingly accomplished woman: a high-powered attorney who leads a disciplined, if lonely life. But a cancer diagnosis on her 40th birthday startles her into overhauling her life, quitting her job, emptying her apartment, and setting out on a cross-country road trip. Her goal: to carry out her long-dreamt of plan to kill her estranged father. Although she sets out with a singular, murderous focus, her horizons are expanded, and her steely veneer softened by various encounters along the way, both with people from her past and eccentric strangers. Combining the tragic intensity of Lisa Taddeo's Animal and the dark humor of Patrick Cottrell's Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, HESTER is an unexpectedly sensitive novel about violence, moral ambiguity, and the possibility of redemption. Ariel Courage is a graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program, where she was editor-in-chief of the Brooklyn Review. She's currently an assistant fiction editor at AGNI Magazine. Her short work has appeared in Guernica, The New Limestone Review, and the Works Progress. She's been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she was a 2019 Kimmel Harding Nelson resident.