My Virtuous Sister

My Virtuous Sister is a story of abuse, revenge and redemption that debuts missing 20-year-old Welsh emigrée Peddie Smout, famous as a rock star at the end of the last millennium. Among the post-9/11 rubble, her younger brother and soulmate Nate arrives in holiday-season Manhattan in search of his sister. By piecing together the ragged index cards of the makeshift diary he recovers from the Grand Central locker in which Peddie had secreted it, Nate unfolds the story of previous New Year's Eve 1999 and the brief fame of songstress Cordelia Peddie Smout, who, after having understood seduction to be a price of business, loses her record deal, gains a heroin habit, and finds salvation in the form of Alcoholics Anonymous. Or, rather, its star member, Teddy D., at whose “sober” New Year's Eve soiree the reader encounters not a few surprises.

Though Nate narrates Peddie's trials from a distance through the device of her index card diary, the redemptive love of their sibling bond powers his narration, illuminating all that is resilient and luminous in Peddie's character despite her fall from stardom to very hard times.

“Fowler has established himself as the voice of the new generation.”
-The Stranger “A strong eye for the awkward interactions between the sexes.”
-Entertainment Weekly “Who is this guy? This is who; if you were to make a list of 50 promising first novelists now working in the U.S., Fowler should be on it.”
-Miami Herald "So what has changed since Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Cheever recorded the pressures and repression weighing down a sensitive middle-class man trying to make it in a capitalist world? As Fowler tells it, the pressures haven't changed much...Fowler is an expansive, lyrical, inventive writer…Fowler’s invocation of his literary heroes is a joy…”
–The New York Times Book Review