Anna Bruno’s greatest buddy, Leena, is flying in from Chicago to attend her upcoming e-book launch at Penguin Bookshop in Sewickley — and never simply because the 2 have identified one another since center college. Bruno devoted her new novel, High quality Younger Folks, to Leena, and the gesture underscores the work’s concentrate on friendship, in all its sophisticated, enduring, and deeply formative energy.
Bruno, who now lives in Iowa Metropolis, Iowa, and teaches writing on the College of Iowa, returns to Pittsburgh on Sat., Aug. 2, to have fun the discharge of her second novel during an event at Penguin Bookshop.
Set within the fictional Catholic college of St. Ignatius in Sewickley, High quality Younger Folks presents a thriller that unfolds throughout prep college hallways, confessionals, hockey rinks, and Strip District sidewalks. The story follows 20-year-old Francesca “Frankie” Paladino as she investigates the unsolved homicide of her former classmate, Wolf, unraveling secrets and techniques that hint again practically 20 years.
The e-book toggles between previous and current, slowly revealing the tensions and loyalties inside a tightly bonded group of youngsters as they navigate privilege, strain, and betrayal. However for Bruno, essentially the most significant relationship on the web page isn’t romantic and even familial — it’s the one between Frankie and her greatest buddy, Shiv.
“After I completed, it form of struck me as actually a novel about friendship in a whole lot of methods,” Bruno tells Pittsburgh Metropolis Paper. “The friendship between Frankie and Shiv, to me, is a very powerful relationship within the novel.”
It’s additionally probably the most enduring. Bruno imagines Shiv as somebody who will nonetheless be in Frankie’s life nicely after commencement, simply as Leena stays a relentless in hers. The 2 met in center college and later attended Shadyside Academy collectively. Although they now stay in numerous cities, their bond has remained robust, and that type of lasting closeness grew to become a core inspiration for High quality Younger Folks.
Bruno didn’t initially got down to write a homicide thriller. The novel started, she says, with a setting: a prep college in Pittsburgh, impressed by her reminiscences of Shadyside Academy. She was drawn to the bodily magnificence of faculty campuses and the depth of adolescence, an emotional terrain she discovered wealthy with narrative chance. As she developed the story, nonetheless, the theme of institutional decay emerged.
“I used to be type of writing in regards to the non secular dying of the neighborhood,” Bruno explains. “And that form of took the type of a homicide.”
In setting up the fictional St. Ignatius, Bruno selected Sewickley not for its affluence — Fox Chapel or Shadyside would have match that invoice — however for its walkable downtown, architectural character, and small-town really feel.
“There isn’t an actual sense of city [in Fox Chapel]. You type of drive to the mall,” says Bruno. In contrast, Sewickley gave her characters a bodily world to maneuver via: a Starbucks to satisfy at, a deli to seize lunch, streets to wander with teenage aimlessness and significance.
Though she wrote many of the novel in Iowa, Bruno returns to Pittsburgh recurrently and walks the streets of Sewickley, soaking within the environment. She’s additionally been identified to take her two younger youngsters on literary analysis adventures, driving the incline and visiting the Strip similar to her characters do, giving the e-book a way of lived-in specificity.
Nonetheless, what lingers isn’t the setting however the emotional resonance. Frankie’s voice — retrospective and clear-eyed, because of Bruno’s choice to put her in school fairly than highschool — carries the reader via layers of grief, guilt, and sophisticated love.
“There’s a giant distinction between the voice of a excessive schooler and the voice of a faculty scholar,” Bruno says. “You type of mature in these years … so I actually needed to let Frankie have the depth of some years of school the place she will be able to look again on herself and type of snigger.”
In doing so, Frankie turns into a narrator with perspective; a younger lady reexamining the myths of her youth, her neighborhood, and her friendships. And whereas the homicide thriller affords suspense and closure (of a form), the e-book’s true decision lies within the bonds that stay. “You may be associates with somebody as a young person and a child after which develop up and 30 years later nonetheless have them in your life,” Bruno says. “That’s my expertise.”
The Penguin Bookshop occasion will probably be a homecoming in additional methods than one. Along with her childhood greatest buddy, Bruno will probably be joined in dialog by her former English trainer and soccer coach, Buddy Hendershot, a reunion of mentor and mentee that echoes the novel’s themes of return, reminiscence, and connection.
Bruno’s debut novel, Unusual Hazards, was set in upstate New York. Her subsequent work-in-progress contains scenes in San Francisco. However High quality Younger Folks is unmistakably a Pittsburgh e-book, each in geography and in spirit. It’s a narrative of what we stock ahead from our teenage years: the locations, the injuries, the unanswered questions, and, maybe most lastingly, the individuals we by no means actually go away behind.
An Night with Anna Bruno. 5 p.m. Sat., Aug. 2. Penguin Bookshop. 417 Beaver St., Sewickley Free. RSVP required. penguinbookshop.com
