Wastelands

by Melissa Pimentel

Caught in the timeless, dreaming space between life and death, Lucy makes a fateful decision and enters a world where the lines between illusion and reality blur, where waking nightmares roam and she and her fellow inhabitants must earn their freedom through blood. Mirroring Lucy’s struggles, her twin brother Kevin unknowingly watches over this battle while navigating his own wastelands; the ones he has created and the ones he rediscoveries in his estranged, dysfunctional family. Finding herself on the brink of death and guided by some unlikely and colourful companions, Lucy treks across an endless black desert lit by a sunless sky, seeking the elusive truths of her purgatory in order to escape, transforming herself in very unexpected ways in the process. Bearing his own battle scars, Kevin returns to a family that is struggling with the unexplained suicide of a favoured daughter and quickly discovers that he must shed the comforting weight of his old roles or risk losing his younger sister, Jackie, to the same wayward winds that have blown them all apart. The Wastelands explores the invisible lines between life and death, the fragile yet resilient lines that bind families, and the peculiar and particular line cast between Lucy and Kevin that bridges their alternate realities and ultimately brings them both into a world of their own choosing.

334 pages, Paperback

Published October 7, 2013

About the author

Melissa Pimentel grew up in a small town in Massachusetts in a house without cable and therefore much of her childhood was spent watching 1970s British comedy on PBS.

At twenty-two, she made the move to London to do an MA in Modern Literature at University College London. She has lived there happily for ten years, though she still adamantly refuses to eat a scotch egg. Before meeting her fiancé, she spent much of her time trawling the London dating scene for clean, non-sociopathic sexual partners and blogging about it, which became the inspiration for her first novel.

These days, she spends much of her time reading in the various pubs of Stoke Newington and engaging in a long-standing emotional feud with their disgruntled cat, Welles. She works in publishing.

Love by the Book is her debut novel.