“I love, love, love If You Follow Me. It’s
fearlessly honest, occasionally heartbreaking, and extremely funny, and I can’t
recommend it highly enough.” — Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times bestselling
author of Prep and American Wife

In Malena Watrous' beautifully
wrought and deftly written debut novel, we meet Marina, a young woman who has
come to the small, rural Japanese town of Shika to teach English for a year. For
her, Shika is more than just her home as a “temporary person.” It’s also an
attempt to escape the reality that has followed her since her father committed
suicide only a year earlier.

Marina is a big city girl is in a
small town filled with off-beat characters, including an ambitious town
matchmaker, a dentist looking for free English lessons, a high school student who
idolizes Western rap artists, and finally Marina’s America-obsessed supervisor,
Hiro, a town leader whose friendship teaches her more than she ever expected.

If You Follow Me is
at once a fish-out-of-water tale, a dark comedy of manners, and a strange kind
of love story that explores the tension of being the outsider in an intimate
community and the joy in finding that human nature is the same everywhere.