Drowning In Paper Flowers: The Perfect Life Is Made Of Fragile Lies

Drowning In Paper Flowers

Maeve Okafor builds beautiful things for other people's most important days. Paper flowers by the thousands, installations so precise and breathtaking that no one ever thinks to look at the woman making them. She prefers it that way.

When Dara, her younger sister and the dreamer to Maeve's architect, fails to appear at a bridal fitting three weeks before her wedding, Maeve does what she has always done. She drives to Dartmouth. She looks at what was left behind. A coat on the hook. A cold cup of tea. A passport that is no longer in its drawer.

And one small paper flower, hidden where only Maeve would think to look, with an address folded inside it.

What begins as a search becomes a reckoning. Because Dara did not vanish. She walked away deliberately, quietly, and with a plan she had been building for eight months, inside a relationship designed to make her believe she was not capable of building anything at all. She did not tell Maeve because she knew her sister too well. Maeve would have arrived with answers. Dara needed to find her own.

Tracing her sister's path from the back streets of Dartmouth to a women's shelter in Moncton to a farmhouse outside Fredericton, Maeve begins to dismantle more than a mystery. She dismantles the careful distance she has kept from everyone who has ever needed her, the wall she built from competence and called love, and the version of herself she has been constructing, like all her most beautiful work, so that no one could see the frame underneath.

Drowning in Paper Flowers is a novel about sisters and silence, about the slow violence of control and the slower courage of leaving it, and about what it means to finally let someone see you mid-build, unfinished, honest, and still worth looking at.

For readers of Liz Moore, Miriam Toews, and Ann-Marie MacDonald.

Author: Thomas Latimore
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: 03/13/2026
Pages: 268
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.56d
ISBN: 9798251879117

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