Sara Novic

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • A “tender, beautiful and radiantly outraged” (The New York Times Book Review) novel that follows a year of seismic romantic, political, and familial shifts for a teacher and her students at a boarding school for the deaf, from the acclaimed author of Girl at War “For those who loved the Oscar-winning film CODA, a boarding school for deaf students is the setting for a kaleidoscope of experiences.”—The Washington Post ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Booklist True biz (adj./exclamation; American Sign Language): really, seriously, definitely, real-talk True biz? The students at the River Valley School for the Deaf just want to hook up, pass their history finals, and have politicians, doctors, and their parents stop telling them what to do with their bodies. This revelatory novel plunges readers into the halls of a residential school for the deaf, where they’ll meet Charlie, a rebellious transfer student who’s never met another deaf person before; Austin, the school’s golden boy, whose world is rocked when his baby sister is born hearing; and February, the hearing headmistress, a CODA (child of deaf adult(s)) who is fighting to keep her school open and her marriage intact, but might not be able to do both. As a series of crises both personal and political threaten to unravel each of them, Charlie, Austin, and February find their lives inextricable from one another—and changed forever. This is a story of sign language and lip-reading, disability and civil rights, isolation and injustice, first love and loss, and, above all, great persistence, daring, and joy. Absorbing and assured, idiosyncratic and relatable, this is an unforgettable journey into the Deaf community and a universal celebration of human connection.

A Novel

True Biz

Lindsay

all those years of energy poured into achieving the aesthetic of being educated rather than actually having learned anything.

It is so damn depressing, February said as she pushed through the side door. That the biggest dream some people can muster up for their child is “look normal.”

Austin sometimes thought that if hearing people ever studied the power and speed of the Deaf rumor mill, they might think twice about classifying deafness as a “communication disorder.”

It was hard to imagine what the world might be like if deaf people had as short a fuse about hearing people’s inability to sign, their neglect or refusal to caption TV, or, hell, the announcements on this bus. Of course, that was their privilege— to conflate majority with superiority.

She cannot decide whether the heart’s craving for opposites— not only from itself, but from the others it loves— is its greatest strength or biggest failing.

reason is for people who still have something to fear.

If these walls could talk, would it matter? Who would hear the secrets we bear?

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