Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

“Valente’s beautiful, elegiac novel about a community in mourning, and the unseen forces that unravel and consume us after a tragedy, is a work of heartbreaking timeliness.” – J. Ryan Stradal, New York Times bestselling author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest

“Haunting…Written in the collective voice…à la Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, Valente artfully employs…newspaper articles, and biographies of teh victims on the way to an unforgettable ending, with fire serving as a powerfully fitting metaphor for grief, loss…and the nature of fate.” – Publishers Weekly

“Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down is a beautifully written, lyrical book wrapped up in a compelling mystery with shades of Stephen King. Gripping and profound, a terrific debut.” – Kate Hamer, author of The Girl in the Red Coat

“Breathtaking…Riveting characters…This reader found herself increasingly spellbound by this remarkable and urgent debut novel.” – Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me

“Valente is a sorceress…This is a gorgeous book full of mysteries. It scorches with truth, and sings with hope. Valente writes like all of our lives depend on it.” – Diane Cook, author of Man V. Nature

“Pulsing, eerie, and impossible to put down…In a cultural moment in which mass violence is shockingly prevalent, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down is that rare gift; a book that is as resonant as it is surprising, as timely as it is soulful.” – Chloe Benjamin, author of The Anatomy of Dreams

“Gripping, visceral…I couldn’t stop reading–or caring about these characters…There’s a tinge of mythic eeriness to this story…but it was the resilient, appealing characters who propelled me through this intense novel, and lingered long after its close.” – Sharon Guskin, author of The Forgetting Time

“One of the most compelling novles I’ve read in years.” – Matt Bell, author of Scrapper

“Lyrical, mysterious, and structurally innovative…This is a book we need now more than ever.” – Kelly Luce, author of Pull Me Under

Anne Valente’s first short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, won the Dzanc Books Short Story Prize and released in September 2014. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook, An Elegy for Mathematics. Her fiction appears in One Story, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Ninth Letter and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others, and won Copper Nickel’s 2012 Fiction Prize and a 2015 Nelson Algren Award Finalist Prize. She was the Georges and Anne Borchardt Scholar at the 2014 Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a featured author at the 2015 One Story Debutante Ball. Her work was selected as a notable story in Best American Non-Required Reading 2011 and her essays appear in The Believer and The Washington Post. Originally from St. Louis, she is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.