Hestia Strikes a Match

A Best Book of the Year at NPR

A Must-Read at The Washington Post, Oprah Daily, and The Orange County Register

"Steamy, smart, and hilarious." --Oprah Daily

"Effervescent . . . Acerbically funny and tender . . . [A] supremely layered, emotionally and intellectually resonant novel for our time." --Lauren LeBlanc, The Boston Globe

Christine Grillo's Hestia Strikes a Match is the slyly funny story of a woman looking for love and friendship in the midst of a new American civil war.

The year is 2023, and things are bad--bad, but still not as bad as they could be. Hestia Harris is forty-two, abandoned by her husband (he left to fight for the Union cause), and estranged from her parents (they're leaving for the Confederacy). Yes, the United States has collapsed into a second civil war and again it's Unionists against Confederates, children against parents, friends against friends.

Hestia has left journalism (too much war reporting) for a job at a Baltimore retirement village on the Inner Harbor (lots of security). She's single and adrift, save for her coworkers and Mildred, an eighty-four-year-old, thrice-happily-married resident who gleefully supports Hestia's half-hearted but hopeful attempts to find love again in a time of chaos and disunion. She reckons with the big questions (How do we live in the midst of political collapse? How do we love people who believe terrible things?) and the little ones (How do I decorate a nonworking fireplace? Can I hook up with a mime?), all while wrestling with that simmering, roiling, occasionally boiling feeling that things are decidedly not okay, but we have to keep going, one foot in front of the other, because maybe, just maybe, we can still find the kinds of relationships that sustain a person through anything.

Christine Grillo's Hestia Strikes a Match is an irreverent, incisive, laugh-out-loud interrogation of modern love of all kinds, in all its messy beauty. Equal parts wise and hilarious, it fills the heart, fortifies the spirit, and will surely help to fend off despair. In the face of the everyday wildness of our times, it asks and answers that newly constant question: How do we make a full, wonderfully ordinary life when the whole mad world is clattering down around us?

Author: Christine Grillo
Publisher: Picador USA
Published: 04/16/2024
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.25h x 5.38w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781250321817

About the Author
Christine Grillo is a writer and an editor whose short fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly, The Southern Review, and LIT. Her nonfiction covers science, public health, food systems, agriculture, and climate change, and has been published in outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic: CityLab, Audubon, NextTribe, and Real Simple. Grillo earned degrees at Columbia University and The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Hestia Strikes a Match is her debut novel.