• Exciting new literary talent: At just twenty-eight years old, Brian DeLeeuw has worked in publishing in both London and New York City, where he is an editor at the literary magazine Tin House. In This Way I Was Saved was acquired in a heated auction.
• Haunting subject: A dark, compelling story that skirts the edges of the supernatural, In This Way I Was Saved evokes the best in edgy psychological horror with overtones of eerie cerebral pyrotechnics. With its dense web of family secrets, its undercurrent of violence, and its brilliant evocation of a troubled young person’s point of view, it has earned comparisons to Donna Tartt.
• Compelling story: Set in the wealthy environs of New York City’s Central Park West, the story begins in 1994, when Luke Nightingale is six and his parents are finalizing their divorce. Luke’s fragile, volatile mother Claire is the last daughter of a crumbling blueblood family; her mother died by her own hand.
The novel is narrated by Luke’s cynical, cruelly perceptive, and sometimes dangerously violent alter ego Daniel—who could be Luke’s imaginary friend, or something else entirely, something implacable, murderous, and evil. A novel about mothers and sons, the dangers of the imagination, the precariousness of sanity, the terrors of childhood, and the temptations of power—In This Way I Was Saved is a stunning debut by a writer of limitless promise.