In Another Sun

"I don't want happiness. I want meaning."

Second edition. The American-born only child of Mexican immigrants, Vanessa Ochoa thought she knew what she wanted until she got it. But when a crisis forces her to redefine her life and start over in the place she swore she would never return to, she searches for something transcendent among the ruins of memory. The narrative weaves in and out of key moments of her youth and adult life: her decision to leave her hometown, her career ascension, and the pursuit of temporal and material desires. Exploring themes of time and fate, family and character, and perseverance against odds, Vanessa's journey is an ode to grace and hope laid bare.

With a simultaneously urgent and unhurried voice, the novel pulses between the past and future and disappointment and possibility as Vanessa searches for a bridge between the known and the unknown while she aims for the steady surge of the Pacific. In chronicling her journey with grace and empathy, Auten also shows the American Dream, hatched in hope, can sour within a generation. A moving, heartbreaking, and thoroughly immersive story. I'll miss Vanessa, her insistent voice and her lost chances haunting long after the last page.

-Jeff Ewing, author of The Middle Ground

In Another Sun reminds us life is experienced in fragments, shards of memories, snippets of conversations, and through what is and what could have been. Auten's prose thoughtfully explores the powerful notion that, perhaps above all, our heart's desire is simply to be known.

-Debbie Graber, author of Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday