OLD FLAME
The author of the “intoxicating Manhattan fairytale” (Kirkus Reviews) Tuesday Nights in 1980 returns with a highly anticipated new novel exploring the intimacies and improbabilities of modern womanhood.
Emily spends her days writing catalogs for a New York City department store, “selling herself to herself”. It’s fun until it isn’t. After her best work friend Megan is laid off, Emily begins to understand that her corporate safety net isn’t as safe as she’d presumed. When she and Megan embark on a soul-searching trip to Italy, during which Emily discovers she is pregnant, Emily is plunged into a past life just as she is forced to make a pivotal decision about her future. In this moment of reckoning, Emily begins to see the cracks in the façade of her life, and to wonder if the structures she has built will hold. Will her vision of the future buckle under the pressures of the “real world”? Will her friendship with Megan? And what about her relationship with her boyfriend, Wes, whose own self-possession keeps him just slightly out of reach?
Through the narrator’s search for meaning and connection, which leads her out of her midtown cubicle and through Bologna’s lonely porticos, into long conversations with old friends and down the poignant passages of poems, Old Flame explores the predicaments, mysteries, pleasures, and contradictions in one young woman’s life, illuminating just how deeply our systems are at odds with the female experience. At once a story of self-discovery, a nostalgic love letter to Italy and a bygone Brooklyn, a crisp rendering of female friendship, and a fierce snapshot of pregnancy and new motherhood, Old Flame is a story about the things we leave behind and how we burn for them, and how our worlds widen as we let them go.
TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980
Welcome to SoHo at the onset of the eighties: a gritty, quickly gentrifying playground for artists and writers looking to make it in the big city.
Among them: James Bennett, a synesthetic art critic for the New York Times whose unlikely condition enables him to describe art in profound, magical ways, and Raul Engales, an exiled Argentinian painter running from his past and the Dirty War that has enveloped his country. As the two men ascend in the downtown arts scene, dual tragedies strike, and each is faced with a loss that acutely affects his relationship to life and to art.
It is not until they are inadvertently brought together by Lucy Olliason—a small town beauty and Raul’s muse—and a young orphan boy sent mysteriously from Buenos Aires that James and Raul are able to rediscover some semblance of what they’ve lost.
As inventive as Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and as sweeping as Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings, Tuesday Nights in 1980 boldly renders a complex moment when the meaning and nature of art is being all but upended, and New York City as a whole is reinventing itself. In risk-taking prose that is as powerful as it is playful, Molly Prentiss deftly explores the need for beauty, community, creation, and love in an ever-changing urban landscape.
PRAISE
“Old Flame asks all the important questions: What if women are people? What if relinquishment of the Self is a good thing? How does a person make good on the past while charting a future? What does it mean to no longer be young?” — Elisa Albert, author of Human Blues
“A stylish and sharp look at one woman’s attempt to balance the competing interests of her work and life. A balm for anyone overwhelmed with contradictory desires.” – Kiley Reid, author of “Such a Fun Age”
"Old Flame is amazing—a warmhearted and luminous page-turner about desire, time, love, parenthood, work, and art in women’s lives. What a woman invents of herself, what the world demands she be, and the stories she tells to find her many selves across a lifetime are considered with both the scorching verve of Elena Ferrante and the frank humor of Maria Semple. This unforgettable book is a love letter to love itself, to how hard and wonderful life is, and to finding home, in all its thrilling, changing forms, every mysterious and known." —Sophie McManus, author of The Unfortunates
“In one sentence, Ms. Prentiss captures a sense of intoxication and possibility that six seasons of voice-overs from Sarah Jessica Parker never could.” (The New York Times)
"First-time novelist Prentiss vividly conjures a colorful love triangle set in the gritty, art-soaked world of downtown New York in 1980. Impressive, too, is her ability to create an atmosphere that crackles with possibility as well as foreboding...a bold and auspicious debut." (Publishers Weekly)
“An intoxicating Manhattan fairy tale… As affecting as it is absorbing. A thrilling debut.” (Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review))
"Tuesday Nights in 1980 is a sweepingly large and profound story about art, love and actualization, cleanly and beautifully composed... A poetic novel of ambitiously profound considerations, a large-scale drama in a series of small, perfectly rendered moments." (Shelf Awareness)
"We are luckily introduced to three individuals who bravely take the stage, ready to conquer SoHo by storm. Their trek amongst the bright lights is captivating, and readers will be hanging on the edge of their seats." (RT Book Reviews)
An April 2016 LibraryReads Pick (LibraryReads)
“Tuesday Nights in 1980 is a discerning, passionate and humane work.” (BookPage)
“A sharp rendering of a city in transition.” (The Guardian)
"It's 1980 in SoHo, and in this thrilling, vibrant debut, a synesthetic art critic could make or break [an artist named] Raul. And so could a girl named Lucy. Oh, and his own recklessness, too." (Marie Claire magazine)
"It isn't easy to write a novel about art, and even harder to write a novel about art this good, with this much energy and verve and sense of adventure—and Molly Prentiss has done it. "Tuesday Nights in 1980" is much more than an accomplished first novel; it is a beautifully written story of creation and transformation, set against a backdrop of urban decay and political violence. I loved this book." —Daniel Alarcon, author of At Night We Walk in Circles and Lost City Radio
"For those of us who like our novels soulful and brainy, ambitious and deeply felt, Molly Prentiss has given us a first work of fiction to marvel at and then savor. This is a serious young writer in full command of her craft." —Tom Barbash, author of Stay Up With Me
"Whether her canvas is as broad as the New York City art world in the good old days of glitz and excess, or as small as the quiet, deeply moving connection between brother and sister, Molly Prentiss seems able to render any expression of humanity expertly onto the page. "Tuesday Nights in 1980" has worlds in it, all widely appealing, and Molly Prentiss has chops to spare. I can't imagine the soul who won't love this book." —Marie Helene Bertino, author of 2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas