My New Face

A writer and her husband are spending the summer in an unnamed town. They pass their days adrift in a lush and strange place, where shops are small and intimate, the water is vivid and blue, and the streets are often empty.

One afternoon, the woman sees another woman in the town square, her young son in tow. The stranger’s face has an uncanny familiarity, making a small fissure in the placid surface of the season. Their uneasy entanglement will force the writer to face what she’s run from, the grief at once so private and collective, so intimate and ambient that it’s become a kind of company.

Compressed, disquieting, and powerfully metaphysical, Amina Cain’s My New Face unfurls over the course of a single sweltering summer to tell a story of making art and taking care in times of crisis. It is a powerful and thoroughly modern fable about the limits of our knowledge, and about love, mystery, and the way each requires the other.

‘Brilliantly expansive…Cain writes beautiful, precise sentences about what it means to wander through this luminous world.’ Jenny Offill, author of Weather, on Indelicacy

‘Her bone-clean prose creates a sense of immersion in a story that feels both mythic and true.’ Guardian on Indelicacy

‘Cain’s small but mighty novel reads like a ghost story and packs the punch of a feminist classic.’ New York Times Book Review on Indelicacy

‘On its surface, her fiction is quiet, lovely, contained, but sit with any passage and that which seems still uncoils and comes alive.’ The Rumpus on Indelicacy