Us Fools

* National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction Finalist *

"Great American Novels are still being published in 2024 and here is one of them."
—Molly Young, New York Times

"Exquisitely funny... a novel that is uniquely and urgently about and for today, mapping the uncrossable distance between the coasts and the heartland, between the America we’ve been and the America we want to be. Its reward is to witness a rapturous and rare kind of truth. This savage American novel consumed me, as much as I consumed it."
—Eleanor Henderson, New York Times Book Review

"This novel is tender and exceptionally moving, but also mordantly funny in parts, and it’s a razor-sharp critique of American capitalism. And it’s written so beautifully that it’s hard to believe it’s a debut novel."
—Michael Schaub, NPR: Books We Love 2024

A tragicomic, intimate American story of two precocious sisters coming of age during the Midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s.

Joanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised on their family farm in rural Illinois, keenly affected by their parents’ volatile relationship and mounting financial debt, haunted by the cursed history of the women in their family. Largely left to their own devices, the sisters educate themselves on Greek mythology, feminism, and Virginia Woolf, realizing they must find unique ways to cope in these antagonistic conditions, questioning the American Dream as the rest of the country abandons their community in crisis.

As Jo and Bernie’s imaginative solutions for escape come up short against their parents’ realities, the family leaves their farm for Chicago, where Joanne—free-spirited, reckless, and unable to tame her inner violence—rebels in increasingly desperate ways. After her worst breakdown yet, Jo goes into exile in Deadhorse, Alaska, and it is up to Bernadette to use all she’s learned from her sister to revive a sense of hope against the backdrop of a failing world.

With her debut novel, Nora Lange has crafted a rambunctious, ambitious, and heart-rending portrait of two idiosyncratic sisters, determined to persevere despite the worst that capitalism and their circumstances has to throw at them.