In a working-class Irish Catholic town, the abuse of a young girl is hushed up by a community more interested in civility than justice. Now, almost two decades later, sweet, damaged Charlotte starts receiving obscene text messages from someone who insists he knows her secret, and ten seemingly unconnected lives are pulled into an intricate and dangerous swerve toward tragedy. A heart stopping tale about human fragility and the momentum of evil, I Was Here is a tour de force of storytelling, equal parts Paul Haggis and Tobias Wolff, told with the fierce empathy that fans of Kadish's first two novels have come to know as distinctively her own.
"A story of evil's aftermath that somehow manages to be both terrifying and profoundly kind, I Was Here is more than an extraordinary novella - it is an announcement that Rachel Kadish, long one of our most promising writers, is now a literary force to be reckoned with." -- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, bestselling author of The Mind-Body Problem
Rachel Kadish is the author of the novels From a Sealed Room and Tolstoy Lied: a Love Story. Her work has been read on National Public Radio and has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Ploughshares, Tin House, Zoetrope, Bomb, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She’s a graduate of Princeton University, holds an M.A. in creative writing from New York University, and has been a fiction fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and of the Massachusetts Cultural Council as well as a writer-in-residence at Stanford University. She lives outside Boston, where she teaches fiction in Lesley University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, and is a research associate at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. I Was Here is her first novella.
