"Family fissures, family myths, mental illness and finding roots after falling, this remarkable novel makes for a mesmerising, moving read."
Infused with Prague’s spectral atmosphere and a powerfully haunting evocation of mental illness (and finding a way through it), Renee Branum’s Defenestrate feels at once utterly unique and entirely authentic. At its heart is an exploration of how we tell ourselves stories to cope with trauma, depression, repression, feeling disengaged with the world, and how we might find a place in the world after many falls. Written in short, shard-like episodes, this bold, enigmatic novel speaks to the soul in unexpected ways.
Twins Marta and Nick have been haunted by the tragic tale of their great-great-grandfather Jiri for their entire lives. The story goes that he was pushed to his death in his native Prague, whereupon his family left the city to make a new life in the American Midwest. In the throes of a Buster Keaton obsession since childhood, the twins spend time in Prague as adults, two lost souls, evasive of reality, with their religious mother struggling to accept that Nick is gay. In this city that exudes a “mythic glow”, Marta comes to realise that they’re not living, that Nick is sinking: “I saw the ways the city had took shape in Nick, watching the liquor reach his veins, and spread along them like a highlighter over the correct route on a road map.” When he’s seriously injured after falling from a window, Marta wonders whether the fall was intentional. She’s stirred to try to ground herself, to stop her family from falling apart for good. Realising that faith has many forms, that you can have faith “in your own life, in the unseen shapes the world sometimes takes, in the stories you tell yourself to gain back trust”, she comes to a kind of peace: “If we still live, we live more carefully, hopefully.”
| Primary Genre | Literary Fiction |
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'Our speech is so full of falling. We fall down laughing, fall apart, fall away, we fall prey to things, fall from grace, fall in love. We fall down dead.'
One thing that the city of Prague is famous for is its recurring incidents of throwing men out of windows. The word for this is defenestration.
In 1895, Marta's great-great-grandfather Jiri was said to have given a gentle push to the back of a stonemason for having wronged him. The stonemason fell to his death and the family fled the Czech capital for the American Midwest, where they set up a new life.
So begins the story of Marta and her brother Nick, deeply interwoven twins haunted by the mysterious curse that has plagued their family for centuries, one that has doomed them to suffer various types of falls. And when Nick falls out of a window and ends up seriously injured, Marta embarks on a heart-breaking quest to find out whether or not his fall was intentional, and to stop her family from falling apart.
Grappling with family myths, sexual repression and mental illness, Defenestrate is a novel about the kinds of tales we tell ourselves and others in order to cope. With heartfelt and deeply-drawn characters, Renee Branum shows us how stories can shield us, and reveal and conceal life's secrets. From a major new voice in literary fiction, Defenestrate is a novel about belonging, and finding one's place in a world in which you are, quite literally, plummeting.
Defenestrate features in the following genres: General Fiction, Debut Books of the Month, Debuts, Family Drama, Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Narrative theme: Interior life, Fiction, Recommendations, Fiction: narrative themes, Literary Fiction
Defenestrate is available in Paperback, Hardback
Defenestrate was written by Renee Branum and published by Jonathan Cape Ltd an imprint of Vintage Publishing
Defenestrate has 224 pages
£13.49
