VISITATION STR

VISITATION STR

Chosen by Dennis Lehane for his eponymous imprint, Ivy Pochoda’s Visitation Street is a riveting literary mystery set against the rough-hewn backdrop of the New York waterfront in Red Hook. It’s summertime in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a blue-collar dockside neighborhood. June and Val, two fifteen-year-olds, take a raft out onto the bay at night to see what they can see. And then they disappear. Only Val will survive, washed ashore; semi-conscious in the weeds. This shocking event will echo through the lives of a diverse cast of Red Hook residents. Fadi, the Lebanese bodega owner, hopes that his shop will be the place to share neighborhood news and troll for information about June’s disappearance. Cree, just beginning to pull it together after his father’s murder, unwittingly makes himself the chief suspect, but an enigmatic and elusive guardian is determined to keep him safe. Val contends with the shadow of her missing friend and a truth she buries deep inside. Her teacher Jonathan, a Julliard School dropout and barfly, wrestles with dashed dreams and a past riddled with tragic sins. “ Visitation Street is urban opera writ large. Gritty and magical, filled with mystery, poetry and pain, Ivy Pochoda’s voice recalls Richard Price, Junot Diaz, and even Alice Sebold, yet it’s indelibly her own.” - Dennis Lehane “Ivy Pochoda makes the saltiness of Brooklyn’s Red Hook come to life so vividly that every time I looked up from the pages of this intoxicating novel, I was surprised not to be there. Reading Visitation Street , imbued as it is with mystery and danger, I am utterly convinced that Pochoda is herself a medium, capable of communicating across boundaries real and imagined, across noisy courtyards and over rough waves. She is simply too good at hearing voices-and sharing them-for that not to be the case.” - Emma Straub, author of Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures “Ivy Pochoda makes the saltiness of Brooklyn’s Red Hook come to life so vividly that every time I looked up from the pages of this intoxicating novel, I was surprised not to be there. Visitation Street is imbued with mystery and danger. - Emma Straub, author of Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures “ Visitation Street explores a community’s response to tragedy with crystalline prose, a dose of the uncanny, and an unblinking eye for both human frailty and resilience. Marvelous.” - Deborah Harkness, bestselling author of A Discovery of Witches “ Visitation Street explores a community’s response to tragedy with crystalline prose, a dose of the uncanny, and an unblinking eye for both human frailty and resilience. Marvelous.” - Deborah Harkness, bestselling author of A Discovery of Witches “Pochoda’s premise is inspired, the novel that unfolds even more so. Rich characters, surprising shifts of plot and mood. I loved it.” -Lionel Shriver, award winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver, award winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin “Utterly transporting.”- People - People “Fans of Richard Price will immediately recognize his New York here, with its barely concealed ethnic tensions played out on a landscape of grit sprinkled with flecks of beauty. . . . Visitation Street is an impressive entry into the field . . . of female suspense novelists ― among them, Tana French, Laura Lippman and Kate Atkinson―who who are arguably writing more serious genre fiction than their male counterparts.” - New York Times “Masterful . . . a novel that pulls you deeper and deeper along in its powerful current. . . . While Pochoda brilliantly depicts the grime and submerged violence of Red Hook, she also soars above it, showing us the powerful aspirations of characters who hope and dream despite every reason not to. Like Lehane, Pochoda is an author with a profound understanding of human resilience, our indefatigable determination to seek light through the darkness. Her characters don’t want to be rich, but to find their better selves, move beyond their limited circumstances. In Pochoda’s telling, these aspirations are heroic.” - Boston Globe “A good story . . . an urban drama with shocking secrets at its heart. . . . Visitation Street contains elements of both mystery and ghost story. But thanks to Pochoda’s lucid style and her gift for psychological exploration, the novel transcends genre to become a poignant chronicle of loss, isolation and the human need to wrest meaning from the senseless workings of chance.” - Dallas Morning News “Pochoda doesn’t need the conventions of genre fiction to tell a compelling story. . . . With deep insight and a merciless eye, the author has created a cast of richly imagined characters who, in turn, bring the fading community of Red Hook to vivid life. This is the kind of novel the reader closes reluctantly, wishing it were possible to follow the characters into the future and make sure everything turns out well for them.” - Washington Independent Review of Books “There are certainly mystery elements