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Book SynopsisFEATURED IN QUILL & QUIRE'S 2023 FALL PREVIEW
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From the author of Maidenhead, a reverse cautionary tale about a young woman exploring the boundaries of sex and belonging in the early 2000s
Distraught that her teenage daughter is in love with a woman a decade older, Yara’s mother sends her away from their home in Brazil to Israel, on a Birthright trip for Jewish youth. Freed from her increasingly controlling and jealous girlfriend, Yara is determined to forge her own path and follow her desires.
But Birthright takes a debaucherous turn, and Yara flees Israel for Toronto and then California. As she wanders, Yara is forced to reframe her relationship and her ideas around consent. Set in the sex-tape-panicked early 2000s, Yara is a reverse cautionary tale about what the body can teach us.
"Tamara Faith Berger is one of our best writers of the body, capturing in sharp, red-hot prose its raw animal urges, its often confused and contradictory desires, and the way our search for pleasure can be both liberatory and self-annihilating. Like Israel, bodies are contested territories, and in Berger's revelatory new novel, Yara seeks to wrest control and meaning from the forces that seek to instrumentalize hers: nationalism, capitalism, pornography, and lovers." – Jordan Tannahill, author of The Listeners
"Yara is a complicated novel about the confusions of consent and kinship, the way love makes victims of us all, told with cool, epigrammatic verve. As raw, destabilizing and searching as its titular protagonist, it's Berger's best book yet." – Jason McBride, author of Eat Your Mind
"Canada’s finest and boldest writer. Tamara Faith Berger is my favourite ball buster." – Anakana Schofield, author of Bina: A Novel in Warnings
Trade Review"From peace (shalom) to scapegoat to porn, Yara is a coming-of-age story with metafictional moments." – Michael Greenstein, Miramichi Reader
"This provocative coming-of-age story from Berger raises questions about sexuality, power, and the intersection of the personal and the political." – Publishers Weekly
"With each successive book, the author has discovered greater control over her material; Yara represents her most fully realized vision yet. Intricate and morally uncompromising, the novel operates at the nexus of identity, sexuality, politics, and family." – Steven W. Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag
"Berger set out to situate a young woman’s sexual struggles within a broader web of connections, but without ever losing the immersive feeling of a page-turner – politics are present, but the book is also not an allegory." – Jean Marc Ah-Sen, The Globe and Mail
"This novel is told vividly and directly, and it will leave readers with much to consider and question. Tamara Faith Berger is utterly unflinching, both in depicting human sexuality and posing difficult ethical quandaries. This is the kind of book that really highlights how avoidant so many novels are when it comes to exploring these fundamental pleasures and problems." – Keith Mosman, Powell's Books
