Victor Lodato is an award-winning playwright and poet and the recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships This is his first novel. He lives in Tucson and New York City. We'll forgive him Tucson, if only because this debut novel is so singularly impressive.

The eponymous Mathilda is a voice to remember. Her sister has been killed, her grief-stricken parents are distant blurs, and Mathilda herself is fearless. Mathilda decides she’s going to figure out what lies behind the catastrophe. She starts sleuthing through her sister’s most secret possessions—e-mails, clothes, notebooks, whatever her determination and craftiness can ferret out. More troubling, she begins to apply some of her older sister’s magical charisma and powers of seduction to the unraveling situations around her. In a storyline that thrums with hints of ancient myth, Mathilda has to risk a great deal—in fact, has to leave behind everything she loves—in order to discover the truth.

Victor will be discussing the novel with Courtney Hodell, his editor at FSG and the hand behind novelists like Wells Tower and Amitav Ghosh.