Susan Coll

Word Salad
Forthcoming September 15 from Harper Muse. Preorder now!

Word Salad

Former economics major Matilda is living where she never thought she would—back in her hometown of Washington D.C.—at a job she never imagined she’d take—at her neighborhood bookstore. She’s coping with the recent loss of her mother and trying, in vain, to make sense of illogical business of books. To make things worse, she’s forced to team up with a new hire—the enigmatic, flaky, larger-than-life, Sage—who shows up on her first day of work with zero administrative skills and her tiny, puffy, incessantly urinating dog that resembles an underfed rat.

Something in the chaos begins to remind Matilda of her long-neglected creative side, and she starts to rediscover the person she once was before so much got in the way. But things get even more unmanageable when Matilda and Sage are tasked with putting together an event for a reclusive and controversial windbag of a public intellectual with a cult following that includes a number of people who would like to literally and figuratively see him dead. Add in a lawsuit and an impending snowstorm and Matilda is about to come undone.

Bestselling author Susan Coll’s gastric, bookish, laugh-out-loud comedy of manners reminds us that sometimes things have to completely fall apart for them to perfectly come together.

Available at:
Politics & ProseBarnes & NobleAmazonBookshop.orgAudibleHarper Collins

reviews

“On the far side of reason, past the last aisle of logic, lies the delight of Coll’s mad, mad bookstore world.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Oh, how I loved this book! WORD SALAD is Susan Coll at her best—sharp, funny, and packed full of delightfully off-beat characters (including one truly disastrous dog). But beneath this witty comedy of manners is a moving, thoughtful exploration of the complicated nature of grief and the power that books have to help us find ourselves when we’re lost. Reading a novel by Coll is like spending the afternoon with your warmest, wisest, funniest friend.”
Grant Ginder, national bestselling author of SO OLD, SO YOUNG
“A wonderfully precise and absurd comedy. Susan Coll grounds her humor in the perfect seriousness with which her characters respond to the impossible chaos of their surroundings. Matilda is careful and observant and such a pleasure to spend time with, even as events around her spiral out of control and into a mass of petty revenges, doomed plots, unexpected romances and badly behaved dogs.”
Holly Gramazio, author of The Husbands
“Just when you think AI is taking over the world, along comes Susan Coll's charming, compelling WORD SALAD to remind us that impossible feelings, imperfect people, and unpredictable events are the essential ingredients of a full human life.”
Pamela Redmond, author of Younger and Old Woman Naked

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