University of Maine Farmington assistant professor of creative writing, Amy Neswald’s first novel, “I Know You Love Me too,” has been named the winner of the 2019 New American Fiction Prize. The celebratory launch, which was delayed due to COVID, will now take place at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 1, in The Landing in the Olsen Student Center on South Street. It is free and open to the public.

According to UMF COVID protocol, masks are required in all campus indoor spaces. For the purpose of contact tracing, anyone interested in attending is asked to email Dawn Nye at dawn.nye@maine.edu.

The novel-in-stories is about sisterhood, grief, and discovering one’s true self through the accidents of life. The book circles around two half-sisters, Ingrid and Kate, eight years apart, whose shared father dies when Ingrid is 20 and Kate, 12. As Ingrid struggles with her artistic identity and love life, the hairline cracks in Kate’s seemingly perfect life widen.

Told from varying perspectives, the story follows Ingrid and Kate through their lives, loves, and their attempts to understand their inheritance of mysteries and memories left behind by their dead father. As Ingrid muses in Friday Harbor, the relationship between half-sisters should be half as complicated … but it’s not.

The reading is sponsored by the UMF Creative Writing Program.

For more information, visit umf.maine.edu.

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