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WE COULD BE RATS

Emily Austin

A moving story about two very different sisters, and a love letter to childhood, growing up, and the power of imaginationfrom the bestselling author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead and Interesting Facts About Space.

Sigrid hates working at the Dollar Pal but having always resisted the idea of growing up into the trappings of adulthood, she did not graduate high school, preferring to roam the streets of her small town with her best friend Greta, the only person in the world who ever understood her. Her older sister Margit is baffled and frustrated by Sigrid's inability to conform to the expectations of polite society.

But Sigrid's detachment veils a deeper turmoil and sensitivity. She's haunted by the pains of her pastfrom pretending her parents were swamp monsters when they shook the floorboards with their violent arguments to grappling with losing Greta's friendship to the opioid epidemic ravaging their town. As Margit sets out to understand Sigrid and the secrets she has hidden, both sisters, in their own time and way, discover that reigniting their shared childhood imagination is the only way forward.

What unfolds is an unforgettable story of two sisters finding their way back to each other, and a celebration of that transcendent, unshakable bond.

Emily R. 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.

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Book Published 2025-01-01 by Atria Books

Comments

A darkly funny and tender look at the wonders of childhood imagination, the loss of innocence, and the distinct and often inescapable bonds of sisterhood. Austin has a gift for creating characters so real with insights so uniquely personal that they live in my heart long after the final page.

We Could Be Rats is achingly true to life in all its ugly, gorgeous, and stupidly funny complexities. Emily Austin has written a tender exploration of grief, sisterhood, and what it is to be a bit wobbly in a world that demands you get your footing. No one blends humor and existentialism quite like AustinWe Could Be Rats is a must read.

Sigrid works a small job at the Dollar Pal in a small town called Drysdale as she plans her death by suicide. Austin's (Interesting Facts about Space, 2024) third novel features sisters trying to find truth and connection. Twenty-one chapters are called "attempts," both a reference to suicidality and to the challenge of figuring out what to say. The second section is Sigrid's sister's "truth." And the final section provides revelations about Sigrid's identity and her whys. The sisters grew up in a house of violent arguments. Sigrid tries to explain her childhood to her sister and the importance of her best friend, whom she lost in adulthood, by lying, then confessing, then lying and confessing again and again. Easily readable in clear sentences that try to recapture youthful imagination, toy worlds in a basement, and a Barbie doll abandoned in the woods, this novel is a compelling experience in reaching and reclaiming.

For the townies, the freaks, the dykes, the dropoutsall of us who think the world would be better if we evaporated, if we traded working at the Dollar Pal and hating ourselves for living the good life as rodents at a carnival. Emily Austin's signature dark humor and sharp observations into the human condition grip and entertain while a series of suicide notes unravel the truths behind addiction, bitter family fights, and anonymous bomb threats against a certain conservative politician in small town Canada. There are no caricatures here, just me, you, and everyone we know. It's Alice Monro for depressed lesbians, and it made me weep before it gave me a hug.

Emily Austin's latest is a masterclass in voice, unreliable narrators, and unknowable characters you get to know anyway because their small town and weird family and struggles with the world are so recognizable and so intimately detailed. We Could Be Rats is a one-sitting-read portrait of the complicated relationship between two sisters, unusual but familiar, moving but difficult, and, ultimately, the light in the darkness they each and we too so badly need.