A raw, lucid coming-of-age novel from Natasha Stagg published by Semiotext(e). Grand Rapids follows fifteen-year-old Tess after her mother’s death, as she comes of age in early-2000s Michigan — drifting through suburban streets, basement rooms and care home shifts, trying to make sense of grief, desire and what it means to belong.

Spare, vivid and unflinching, Stagg’s prose captures the turbulence of adolescence: high nights, blurry identities and the ache of memory. Tess remembers that summer as both prison and possibility, a period that reshapes her long after the last wave on the Grand River has broken.

Grand Rapids is a novel about vertigo — the pull of place, the pull of escape, and the hazy terrain between who we were and who we become.