Irene Fermi is different from other children.
Maybe it’s the way she dresses or how she talks. Maybe it’s the things she thinks. And while her sister is perfect, she is just the opposite.
Longing to be normal, Irene must learn how to hide, when to run, and who to fight. With her grandmother, weekend father, and shell-shocked uncle as allies, she counts each moment of calm as a victory.
Now a dying woman, Irene looks back on her life and unravels the knotted relationship with her mother and finds that she may have been wrong about everything.
In a world impossible to navigate, the true north of The Physics of Things is the triumph of love and the resilience of the human spirit.
WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING:
"Fite captures the complexity of lived lives in language so accurate and clean that I’m reminded of what superb writing can do, namely invoke our own human condition. When the narrator says, “This is what we think we’ll say before confusion and rage take us, before we lose our voices to sorrow, before the loud clanging disbelief that this could happen renders us deaf. We hold our breaths, clueless about the future” – this is the human condition in a nutshell. This kind of stunningly beautiful observation stopped me in my tracks throughout. Fite’s characters reexamine the past, not out of nostalgia, but because they are trying to find a way forward in a world that sometimes feels impossible to navigate. The book is emotionally rich, the characters complex and human. Fite has given us a novel that will, ultimately, help us understand our own pasts in a bid to do the bravest thing possible – namely, live a happy life."
—N. West Moss, author of Flesh & Blood: Reflections on Infertility, Family, and Creating a Bountiful Life (Algonquin 2021)
Genre: Literary Fiction
Maybe it’s the way she dresses or how she talks. Maybe it’s the things she thinks. And while her sister is perfect, she is just the opposite.
Longing to be normal, Irene must learn how to hide, when to run, and who to fight. With her grandmother, weekend father, and shell-shocked uncle as allies, she counts each moment of calm as a victory.
Now a dying woman, Irene looks back on her life and unravels the knotted relationship with her mother and finds that she may have been wrong about everything.
In a world impossible to navigate, the true north of The Physics of Things is the triumph of love and the resilience of the human spirit.
WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING:
"Fite captures the complexity of lived lives in language so accurate and clean that I’m reminded of what superb writing can do, namely invoke our own human condition. When the narrator says, “This is what we think we’ll say before confusion and rage take us, before we lose our voices to sorrow, before the loud clanging disbelief that this could happen renders us deaf. We hold our breaths, clueless about the future” – this is the human condition in a nutshell. This kind of stunningly beautiful observation stopped me in my tracks throughout. Fite’s characters reexamine the past, not out of nostalgia, but because they are trying to find a way forward in a world that sometimes feels impossible to navigate. The book is emotionally rich, the characters complex and human. Fite has given us a novel that will, ultimately, help us understand our own pasts in a bid to do the bravest thing possible – namely, live a happy life."
—N. West Moss, author of Flesh & Blood: Reflections on Infertility, Family, and Creating a Bountiful Life (Algonquin 2021)
Genre: Literary Fiction
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