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A Novel
by Ruth Madievsky
Rachel Kushner meets David Lynch in this fever dream of an LA novel about a young woman who commits a drunken act of violence just before her sister vanishes without a trace.
On the night of her high school graduation, a young woman follows her older sister Debbie to Salvation, a Los Angeles bar patronized by energy healers, aspiring actors, and all-around misfits. After the two share a bag of unidentified pills, the evening turns into a haze of sensual and risky interactions—nothing unusual for two sisters bound in an incredibly toxic relationship. Our unnamed narrator has always been under the spell of the alluring and rebellious Debbie and, despite her own hesitations, she has always said yes to nights like these. That is, until Debbie disappears.
Falling deeper into the life she cultivated with her sister, our narrator gets a job as an emergency room secretary where she steals pills to sell on the side. Cue Sasha, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union who arrives at the hospital claiming to be a psychic tasked with acting as the narrator's spiritual guide. The nature of this relationship evolves and blurs, a kaleidoscope of friendship, sex, mysticism, and ambiguous power dynamics.
With prose pulsing like a neon sign, Ruth Madievsky's All-Night Pharmacy is an intoxicating portrait of a young woman consumed with unease over how a person should be. As she attempts sobriety and sexual embodiment, she must decide whether to search for her estranged sister, or allow her to remain a relic of the past.
"An electric tale ... Madievsky renders her protagonist's search for selfhood vividly and viscerally, resulting in a coming-of-age story that radiates like a Lynchian fever dream." —Publishers Weekly
"[A] coolly delivered debut ... Madievsky captures the mood of a woman working hard to connect with a sense of self, and she has an excellent arsenal of metaphors for disconnection ... An assured debut, at once atmospheric and gritty." —Kirkus Reviews
"Witty, poignant, and darkly funny, All-Night Pharmacy is a vibrant debut about longing, identity, and the wild, unbreakable bonds of family. In prose that is sharp, exuberant, wry, and smart, Madievsky conjures an affecting, utterly unforgettable tale of two tempestuous sisters." —Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light
"All-Night Pharmacy is a genuinely propulsive and magnetic read. Madievsky's writing is rich and boldly dark, slick and queer in all the best ways. Immersing myself in her work felt akin to pressing on a bruise, a beautiful ache that I remembered long after I finished reading. A deeply human, wonderfully twisty novel that takes you down the rabbit hole of familial trauma and back up to the light again. All-Night Pharmacy is a glimmery showstopper of a debut novel. I'm obsessed with it." —Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of Mostly Dead Things
This information about All-Night Pharmacy was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ruth Madievsky's writing appears in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, Harper's Bazaar, The Cut, GQ, Guernica, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of a poetry collection, Emergency Brake, and a Tin House Summer Workshop scholar. She cofounded the Cheburashka Collective, a community of women and nonbinary writers whose identities have been shaped by immigration from the Soviet Union to the United States. Originally from Moldova, she lives in Los Angeles, where she works as an HIV and primary care clinical pharmacist.
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