Fire Exit

Shortlisted for the 2024 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

A lone white man lives beside the river on the edge of the Penobscot reservation in Maine. Charles spends his days doing odd jobs, looking after his depressive mother, and staring across the water to the house in which his half-Native daughter Elizabeth has grown up, unaware of his existence, her paternity hidden to protect her tribal status. Yet the cracks in the foundations of Elizabeth’s life are beginning to show, and Charles can see Elizabeth is struggling, much like his own mother does. He firmly believes the truth will set them all free – but the price of it may be the destruction of them all.

A deeply layered story of family and blood ties, full of quiet, beautiful, and dignified sentences, Fire Exit shows us kinship from all angles, and its capacity to break down, re-form, fade, or strengthen, while always remaining a part of us.

'Utterly consuming … spellbinding and quietly devastating … a sober reckoning with what love can and cannot do, what healing is and is not possible in our families. The novel absolutely smoulders.' Tommy Orange

Short-listed for Center for Fiction First Novel Prize 2024 Short-listed for New England Book Award 2024 Short-listed for Maya Angelou Book Award 2024 Long-listed for Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2025 Long-listed for Joyce Carol Oates 2025 Long-listed for PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel 2025 Nominated for The Goodreads Choice Awards 2024

‘There’s a lovely clarity to Fire Exit . . . this novel does not shy away from blistering questions of belonging and identity, but rather leans into them.” Esi Edugyan, The New York Times

‘Talty is a beautiful craftsman . . . His narrator made me care most about his story’s most vulnerable person.’ Dan Shapiro, The Washington Post

‘Soulful and assured.’ The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

‘It’s Talty’s commitment to the hungover, anti-lyrical nature of fiction that gives the cathartic moments in Fire Exit their beauty and communicative power. At the end of the day, that’s what the book’s realism moves us toward . . . a desire to show us a reality that we recognize, and in so showing give us something to share—something we can have in common. Its picture of suffering is one we know, because it echoes disasters that we have seen and failures we have lived through. In this way, the healing message that it’s sending turns out to be addressed to us, whether we like it or not.’ Josh Billings, Los Angeles Review of Books

‘A striking début novel of cultural inheritance.’ New Yorker

‘Fire Exit depicts troubles with a delicate brush, and indelible ink. You may be a long time forgetting this book.’ Helena Mulkerns, Irish Times

‘Thoughtful, complex ... Talty guides the reader through all of it with compassion and care… just stunning.’ Catherine Jarvie, Marie Claire

Morgan Talty is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation, and the author of the critically acclaimed linked story collection Night of the Living Rez (USA: Tin House Books 2022; UK: And Other Stories 2025), winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Best First Book. His writing has appeared in Granta and The Guardian amongst others, and he was selected by Karen Russell as a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree. Talty is an Assistant Professor of English in Creative Writing and Native American and Contemporary Literature at the University of Maine, Orono, and he is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA in creative writing as well as the Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Levant, Maine.

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