a book
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
Patty Yumi Cottrell · 2016 · 272 pages
Winner of the 2017 Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction
Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, childless, college-educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York. She’s accepting a delivery from IKEA in her shared studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the news: Helen’s adoptive brother is dead.
Helen knows what she must do, and purchases a one-way ticket to Milwaukee. There, as she searches her childhood home and attempts to uncover why someone would choose to die, she will face her estranged family, her brother’s few friends, and the overzealous grief counselor Chad Lambo; she may also discover what it truly means to be alive.
A bleakly comic debut that’s by turns poignant, uproariously funny, and unsettling, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace has shades of Bernhard, Beckett and Bowles—and it announces the singular voice of Patrick Cottrell.
recommended by 1 person
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Ottessa Moshfegh
“Oh, Patty. I miss you! Her debut novel moved me really deeply. It’s so personally written, although it is also a dry dissection of an experience with death, also of a brother. Having lost my own brother recently, Patty’s book, along with Fourteen Stories, reminds me that there is a way out of grief, which is creativity.”↗