The Sabotage Cafe

A gripping first novel about a mother and daughter, the ties that bind them and the extraordinary measures each will take to strengthen or sever their bond.

Entangled in the 1980s Minneapolis punk scene, Julia suffered an unspeakable trauma that drove her into a conventional suburban existence, even as battles with mental illness and unresolved grief continue to scar the veneer of normalcy she tries so desperately to maintain. When her sixteen-year-old daughter goes missing, Julia can envision her every move, from the Minneapolis outskirts into the city's back alleys and abandoned corners. Here, amid a new generation of iconoclasts squatting in the abandoned Sabotage Cafe, Cheryl reenacts her mother's own coming-of-age--a sullied melange of drugs, awkward sex, glib anarchy and random acts of violence--and calls into question everything that either one of them might have hoped to become.

A mesmerizing portrait of a subculture that is visible all around us and yet assiduously ignored--in which today's innocents shoulder their parents' rebellion in addition to their own--The Sabotage Cafe is a tour de force of psychological intrigue, revealing a writer in full, ambitious command of his craft.