How It Works Out

** Shortlisted for the 2025 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award ** Shortlisted for the 2025 Amazon Canada First Novel Award ** Longlisted for the 2024 Story Prize **

“Audacious, breathtaking, and inspiring.” —GEORGE SAUNDERS

“Madcap, delirious, exhilaratingly good.” —KELLY LINK

“A delightfully bizarre and unabashedly queer revelation.” —TEGAN and SARA QUIN

“A beautifully brilliant, hilariously sad stunner of a debut that never forgets about the heart.” —NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH

What if you had the chance to rewrite the course of your relationship, again and again, in the hopes that it would work out?

When Myriam and Allison fall in love at a show in a run-down punk house, their relationship begins to unfold through a series of hypotheticals:

What if they became mothers by finding a baby in an alley? What if the only cure for Myriam’s depression was Allison’s flesh? What if they were B-list celebrities, famous for writing a book about building healthy lesbian relationships? How much darker—or sexier—would their dynamic be if one were a power-hungry CEO, and the other her lowly employee?

From the fantasies of early romance to the slow encroaching of violence that unravels the fantasy, each reality builds to complete a brilliant, painfully funny portrait of love’s many promises and perils.

Equal parts sexy and profane, unsentimental, and gut-wrenching, How It Works Out is a genre-bending, arresting, uncanny exploration of queerness, love, and our drive for connection, in any and all possible worlds.