Porcupines

Sonia believes she knows what is going on in her daughter’s life – some days she is consumed by the weight of all the knowledge: of permission slips, of appointments, of hurt feelings and favourite songs. However, unbeknownst to her, a little wedge of mystery inserted itself into their lives two days, four hours and thirteen minutes ago, when Mila started the computer languishing in a corner of their living room.

It’s 1990: the world has opened up again after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Szonja Imre travels from Budapest to visit her older sister in Los Angeles. She’s an eighteen-year-old in search of adventure in the land of the free.

So she is surprised to find that the sister she’s always idolised has a very different idea of what it means to live the American dream. Rina is reconnecting with their religious roots, tending to her burgeoning family and to Szonja’s horrified eyes, leading a more restricted life than the one she left behind years ago in socialist Hungary. When the gap between them grows too wide to bridge, Szonja makes a decision that leaves her navigating America alone as an illegal immigrant

Ten years later in the suburbs of LA, Sonia, as unconventional as she is guarded, rails against the confines of life as a single mother. Her beloved, precocious daughter Mila has struggles of her own: she excels at following school rules, but the unwritten social mores of the classroom remain a mystery. An even bigger mystery is who her father might be – a question her mother endlessly swats away. When Mila stumbles upon emails between Sonia and an unknown man, her curiosity sets in motion a chain of events that will cause their carefully constructed lives to implode.

Wonderfully funny and brilliantly observed, Porcupines is an irresistible debut novel about mothers and daughters, loneliness and belonging, the things we carry with us, and the people we leave behind.