The Falling Maria

A dark, surreal, and vividly imagined novel about a woman whose fall from grace transforms her into a feminist hero in the afterlife.

Maria-Thérèse Mandapat, a controversial figure in life and death, is known by many descriptors. Survivor of a cold and brutal childhood under her grandfather’s rule. Fighter pilot for France in the first world war. Daredevil barnstormer wending her way across the American south. Single mother. And perhaps most notably: remorseless murderer of six men.

After being hanged for her crimes on Earth, Maria ends up in a prison cell in Hell, while a coterie of subversive saints known as SAD (Saints Against Damnation)—including St. Adelaide, patron saint of abused women, and St. Nicolas, patron saint of the falsely imprisoned—mount a case for her redemption, making Maria a symbol of their revolutionary cause.

In a Heaven populated by busybody angels, beset by an ineffectual court system and a dreary bureaucracy little distinguishable from Earth’s, can a woman who flipped the script, who defied the expectations of her gender, take flight from her circumstances? The Falling Maria marks an audacious turn in Yasuko Thanh’s career, delivering a meditation on suffering and motherhood unlike any that’s come before it.