The Prisoner's Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book.

You keep waiting for the heaviness to leave you. You keep waiting for the moment you never think about the ex again. It doesn't come.

In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.

As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.

I guess it's true what they say: if you wait long enough everything changes.

It's just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.

The U.S. that I had imagined was nowhere near as crazy and as incredibly damaging and brutal and indifferent as the U.S. that we're currently living in. I thought I was being transgressive, apocalyptic, an out-there person. And then reality lapped me, it just lapped me.