Excerpt from Away to Stay:
Flushed with the faith that I can finally stop Mom from prying, I say that it is true, I have not told her everything about what happened when she left me the other night. The truth is that the two outside our car in Griffith Park were not people at all. They were coyotes and they took turns looking in through the windows, their canines dripping, eyes rising like mercury through their skulls, their tails lifted behind them as if strings drew them up. All I had to do was catch their eye, tell them what I wanted, and they would swing open the doors and together we would rise above the parking lot, the pine trees, the observatory on the hill, higher and higher, until the park was just a patch below us and the astronomer at his telescope would mistake us for a star.
Praise for Away to Stay:
Named a Most Anticipated Book by The Millions, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Debutiful.
Away to Stay is sinuous and zizzy, cinematic and beguiling. Mary Kuryla brings us news of our shared precarity, our brutal and borrowed world.
—Noy Holland, author of Bird
Family proves both an elusive dream and disquieting reality in Kuryla’s delightfully quirky debut... Kuryla shines in her descriptions of the offbeat characters and their antics… It adds up to a captivating coming-of-age yarn.
—Publishers Weekly
Mary Kuryla's debut novel, Away to Stay...is a wild ride, a story about the search for home that moves at a breakneck speed and takes sudden left turns while remaining remarkably poignant and heartfelt. Kuryla’s prose shines and illuminates and lifts the story up...you can feel the search for home deep in one's bones.
—Laura Spence-Ash, Ploughshares
Away to Stay is a tense, propulsive, and thrillingly subjective coming-of-age story, with gorgeous prose and slippery characters that will stick with you.
—J. Ryan Stradal, author of The Lager Queen of Minnesota
Away to Stay is tender and madcap…tells the dreamy and disquieting tale of Olya, a 12-year-old living a transient life with her mother…Kuryla has successfully captured the desperations of homelessness.
—Michael Seidlinger, Publishers Weekly Interview
In her tense domestic novel, Kuryla offers readers complex characters to fill the pages of poetic prose.
—Debutiful
Mary Kuryla's gripping debut...The scrutiny of detail and rapid pacing of Away to Stay are so cinematic.
—BOMB
Kuryla has an unflinching eye for the dark strangeness of domestic life and her ravishing prose only deepens the provocation. A powerful and stunningly original book.
—Lexi Freiman, author of Inappropriation
A compelling read.
—Vol. 1 Brooklyn
A novel of the Inland Empire following a working-class immigrant family struggling to keep afloat and housed in an unforgiving economy.
— The Millions, Most Anticipated
Mary Kuryla’s novel Away to Stay is a stunning coming-of-age story.
—Largehearted Boy
Available here: Amazon