Pacifique
LAMBDA LITERARY OCTOBER'S MOST ANTICIPATED LGBTQIA+ LITERATURE
Is love real if the beloved isn’t? Girl, Interrupted meets Rebecca in this taut tale of love and madness.
When Tia meets Pacifique, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime love. They spend five wild days and nights together, and then Tia wakes up in an ambulance with a collarbone broken in a bike accident — and no trace of Pacifique. Unable to convince anyone that Pacifique exists, Tia winds up in a psychiatric ward, forced to face the possibility that this perfect lover may be a figment of her imagination. While there, Tia meets Andrew, a contemplative man with schizophrenia, who falls in love with Tia. He, too, tells her to forget Pacifique. Who to believe? The medical establishment and her fellow patients? Or her frail human memory? And if Pacifique truly is a figment, is life in the 'real world' with Andrew enough?
'In concise and vibrant prose, Sarah L. Taggart illuminates the dark corners of delusion (or is it delusion?) and a mental-health system that consigns people to endless limbo. Lucid and destabilizing, graceful and raw, this novel asks: is losing one’s sanity so different from falling in love?' — Deborah Willis, author of The Dark and Other Love Stories
'Pacifique turns the psychological thriller on its head, allowing madness to be a meaningful lens through which to see the world instead of a cheap plot twist. Taggart has created a stunning, smart and revolutionary novel here — one that forces its readers to see clearly what so often remains hidden. This book means so much to me. One of the best I've read in years.' — Alicia Elliott, author of A Mind Spread Out On The Ground
Sarah L. Taggart is a queer writer with lived experience of madness and forced psychiatrisation. She has published short fiction in The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and Journey Prize Stories. Her short fiction won the Jack Hodgins Founders' Award for Fiction and was an honourable mention in The Fiddlehead's annual fiction contest. She lives in Pito-one, near Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa New Zealand with her partner and their dog, Bagel, and is pursuing a PhD at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington.
