“To read T Kira Madden is to feel your insides endlessly shifting, between barbed and rage-simmering to amused and serene. This brilliant and ever-expanding novel evoked fervent head nods, internal screams, and stretches of pondering. I would follow T Kira anywhere.”
– Chanel Miller, New York Times bestselling author of Know My Name: A Memoir

“Epic in its scope, intimate in its evocation, Whidbey reads like a thriller, compels like a mystery and regarding the human condition, converses with the classics. It’s hard to believe a first-time novelist produced a work as soulful and insightful as Whidbey; then again, one comes away certain that no other writer than T Kira Madden could have composed so profound an accounting. This is the book everyone will be talking about.”
– Adam Johnson, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author of The Orphan Master’s Son and Fortune Smiles

“It is rare that in one writer you’ll find a virtuoso precision on the sentence level, wonderous compassion for character, an unflinching willingness to claw into the heart of human suffering and a propulsive, engaging structure. Reading Whidbey feels like witnessing a cosmic, unlikely happening, like the planets aligning. This book will break you open. Whidbey is Masterwork. In T Kira Māhealani Madden we are seeing a master at work.”
– Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, New York Times bestselling author of Chain-Gang All-Stars and Friday Black

I didn’t know anything about Whidbey Island when I chose it, only that it was far. Only that it would take a great deal of work to get there, and more work to be found. When I say I closed my eyes and pointed to a map, I really mean that. I did. Red votive candle dripping over foil in the center of our dining room table, my girlfriend, Trace, sitting across from me, a full moon over north Brooklyn. Safety, we repeated, a Trace manifestation, and I hovered my hand as if feeling for heat— but when we opened our eyes to Elko, Nevada, it wasn’t exactly far enough, so I moved my finger further west to Whidbey.

One month later Trace flew me to Seattle. We bought the one-way ferry ticket online, drove to the Mukilteo terminal. Then, there was my boat pulling in. Huge and white with a green lid over the top deck windows, a monstrous face to it, the gaping garage. Cars thumped from the ramp onto the ferry as I stepped on board, and it was dark in there, between all that machinery. I rolled my suitcase between cars and cinched my shoulders for better posture, wondering if any of the passengers were wondering about me. Who’s that girl with the practical green suitcase? the faces would ask. What about her?

When I had thoughts this self-dramatizing, which was often, I imagined being hurled down a flight of stairs right after thinking them. Sometimes, knocked out by a mail truck, envelopes bursting onto a wet street. On the boat I followed passengers, and one oft hem— a gaunt freckled woman smeared white with sunscreen— held a door for me at the side of the garage. Thanks, I said, and trailed her and the others up the damp stairwell, like I knew where we were all going. Rather than carrying my suitcase by the handle, I let it clack-clack on each step, the sound echoing awfully. A few of the people looked back at me, just to see who, I guess. I had to commit to the choice now. I clacked all the way up.

The second door brought us to a passenger seating area, and for a moment I was back in Penn Station. For a moment, I’d never left. A white sign read Upper Deck, and windows dotted the whole perimeter, casting a greenish pale light; tables, bolted between pleather booths, collected glossy half-finished puzzles. The room wafted fried fish and cleaning products, and doors led out to a deck. Out there, the day drizzled sloppily over the parking lot and water. Late May, first breezes of summer, but still a cold that crept up shrewd. People walked past me out onto the deck, no umbrellas or anything; they just stood beneath the rain, jackets darkening. They smiled, white caps melting on the mountains behind them, phones clamped onto sticks.

I found a seat inside at the rear of the boat, and with an uneasy quiet, the glass window vibrated, woke to movement. The shoreline of Washington, the trees, Trace waving from our rented Honda Civic, they all grew smaller.