Amy L CLark

Palais Royale

"Every so often, but not often enough, I come across a writer like Amy Clark. Her work alchemizes grace and darkness and compassion and humor to startling effect. Palais Royale is no exception. Full of nods and lunges, both gentle and fierce, toward those big human things of history, politics, belief, and tragedy, managing all the while to center us like a single, shared fulcrum. I've enjoyed Clark's work for years. If you haven't yet, this book is sure to set you dizzyingly down the path. " —Jensen Beach, author of Swallowed By the Cold

"Palais Royale lays bare the way life can become the conflicting roles we find ourselves playing, and how upending it is when those separate selves crash together in fraught circumstances. In prose as raw and direct as her characters, pulling no punches as she pulls us in, Amy L. Clark's debut novel provokes powerful questions about how we keep ourselves whole and what becomes of us when we can't." —Steve Himmer, author of Scratch

"Clark's novel leads us through the scarred histories of her characters. Her characters are chaos-driven shapeshifters, and she pulls us into the complicated interior of their thoughts and strands us there. Their collective chorus captures the uncertainty and claustrophobia of 21st century, and reminds us how we can become strangers to ourselves and places we try to return to. " --Krysten Hill, author of How Her Spirit Got Out.