KIRSTEN SUNDBERG LUNSTRUM's most recent collection of fiction, What We Do with the Wreckage, won the 2017 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her two previous collections are Swimming with Strangers and This Life She's Chosen, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick of the Month. Elita is her first novel. She lives near Seattle.

"An unforgettable book that will haunt you, as it did me, long after you set it down."--Alix Ohlin, author of We Want What We Want

"Brimming with sharp wit and tender observations, Elita strikes a superb balance between scientific scrutiny and the depth of human emotions. Lunstrum's prose surprises us with its taut, keenly observed beauty, delving into the precarity of women in a society where control works behind the facade of civility."--Kristen Millares Young, author of Subduction

"Bernadette, a child development specialist and single mother, is tasked with teaching a nonverbal teenage girl--found alone on an island that houses a prison--to speak. Everything about the girl is shrouded in mystery: her origins, even her age. As Bernadette digs deeper, the questions only multiply. Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum charts the slow-burn relationship between these two unforgettable characters with a luminous sensitivity. Elita is a brooding, atmospheric tour de force of psychological suspense."--Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel

"What propels the novel is not just the mystery of the feral girl and the crime of her abandonment, but the fight for independence and respect that Bernadette must undertake . . . Elita is as much a meditation on society's constraints on women and girls as it is a slow-burning, twisty mystery." --Washington Post

"Dark and gripping."--Seattle Times

"In 1950s Seattle, the cocooned life of a scholar and her young daughter slips its moorings following dual storms: the case of a girl plucked from the wilderness, and the return of the scholar's husband after four years of silence . . . a provocative examination of self-worth." --The Christian Science Monitor, "The 10 Best Books of January"

"A tightly written page-turner . . . Lunstrum constructs a very truthful picture of womanhood, its internality, and the daily struggles that women go through just to be heard." --Seattle Magazine

"Lunstrum uses lyrical language in this tale of deeply held secrets, illustrating it with local imagery." --Cascade PBS

"Immensely satisfying as both a mystery and an unblinkered look at working motherhood." --Kirkus, starred review

"Lunstrum's complex characters, ruggedly wild setting, and depiction of small-town isolation make this a gripping read." --Booklist

"Lustrous . . . Lunstrum's evocative, insightful writing captures the nuanced and moody Pacific Northwest landscape." --Shelf Awareness

"I devoured this novel, held sway by its expert construction and luminous prose, and am haunted still by the wise and impossible questions that simmer under its breathless plot and within its indelible characters. Elita belongs on a shelf among the great literary page-turners of our time."--Melissa Febos, author of Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

Publisher: Triquarterly Books

Pub date: 2025-01-15

Length: 264 pages