Westward Women

'An audacious first novel to set beside Margaret Atwood's provocative first novel The Edible Woman' Joyce Carol Oates
In the summer of 1973, a mysterious infection spurs women across the United States to leave their homes and migrate toward the Pacific Ocean. At a loss for what causes the infection, how it's spread, or what it may ultimately cause women to do, the public refers to the 700,000 women who go missing simply as 'the westward women'.
Three women are caught in the infection's riptide. Cautious twenty-two-year-old Aimee goes in search of her enigmatic, newly infected childhood friend, only to find herself haunted by the voices of other westward women everywhere she goes. Meanwhile, Eve, an ambitious young journalist, is determined to prove her worth by writing a story about a man she hears is collecting infected women across the country. Finally, infected sixteen-year-old Teenie, still grieving from the loss of her sister, begins traveling with a man known only as the Piper, who claims to protect girls like her...

Alice Martin received a BA in Creative Writing from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MA in English from NYU. Previously, she worked in book publishing at Writers House, Algonquin Books, and elsewhere. She is currently an English PhD candidate at Rutgers University, where she researches unpublished accounts of female friendships and teaches American women's writings. Her writing, which has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and received Editor's Choice Awards, has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Appalachian Heritage, Writer's Foundry Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere. When Alice is not teaching or writing fiction, she is a regular contributor at Shelf Awareness.