Where No Gods Came

Enmeshed in a tangled family web, young Faina McCoy is abruptly uprooted against her will from her father and finds herself half a continent away on the doorstep of a mother who abandoned her years before-but who can't live without Faina now. Alone, persecuted, and exploited, Faina must fend for herself in her search for love and answers, navigating the streets of a strange city and forging bonds of feeling with liars and outlaws.

In this candid portrait of the unlikely faces of good and evil, and how an innocent must learn to recognize them to endure, award-winning author Sheila O'Connor tells the compelling story of a young girl caught in a perilous scheme of elaborate lies created for her own harrowing system of survival. Where No Gods Came is a powerful look at assimilation and resilience and the sacrifices we all make to adapt.


Genre: General Fiction

"The various voices ring true. Ms. O'Connor writes of family and love and loss and youth at risk and hard-earned pleasure; she does so with a noticing eye and tone-perfect ear." - Nicholas Delbanco

"Sheila O'Connor's beautifully readable novel about young girls living close to the precipice is truthful, tough, and filled with delicate hope. She shows how we all survive by inches, by grace." - Maureen Gibbon

"For a single mother of three, and a writer who reads countless books a year, to stay up most of the night to finish a novel means it must be a heck of a story: and Sheila O'Connor's novel was, so compelling in the landscape of urban hardscrabble Minneapolis, and the interior horizons of a damaged mother and her two daughters trying to build their own fable of a family. Fervent and despairing and truth-hard, this novel kept me spellbound, hurtling toward a hoped-for redemption." - Susan Straight