Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

“Breathtaking…Riveting characters…This reader found herself increasingly spellbound by this remarkable and urgent debut novel.” - Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me“Anne Valente is a sorceress, conjuring a story of sorrow and suspense with characters so real we feel their heartbreak, their bewilderment, the horrible chills down their spines. With stunning language and emotion, she tells us that those carefree days of our youth are so often pined for because they were rare. That the real work of being young is finding safety in a mad world. Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down will have your heart stuck in your throat, sunk in your gut, then thumping wildly in your chest. 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“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, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down unearths the grief that raises a Midwestern community in the wake of a school shooting. In acrobatic prose, Anne Valente shows us what tragedy leaves behind: how we ask questions that may be unanswerable, ‘how the brain deceives because it must.’ 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“Lyrical, mysterious, and structurally innovative…This is a book we need now more than ever.” - Kelly Luce, author of Pull Me Under“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“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“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“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“One of the most compelling novles I’ve read in years.” - Matt Bell, author of Scrapper

Anne Valente is the author of the short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, which won the Dzanc Books Short Story Prize, and 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.