Marcie Maxfield’s voice is fierce, authentic, and personal. Her debut novel, Em’s Awful Good Fortune, is based on her experiences living overseas as a tagalong wife. Her play Girls Together Always—a collection of coming-of-age stories about “growing up girl”—won the ENCORE! Producer’s Award at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Maxfield lives in Los Angeles, where she is a teen mentor and teaches writing for a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering girls through creativity. She is married with two kids, a French bulldog, and two rescue cats named Hunky and Dory.

This is not your typical expat story. Instead, Em’s Awful Good Fortune explores the struggle between a woman’s desire for partnership and her need for identity. Raw, comic, and authentic, Em stomps her way through Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Seoul on the personal road to self-discovery. True to life, this is a disorderly journey—one that ultimately leads to a new understanding of marriage and compromise, self-love, and the complexity of relationships.

For lovers of books by: Junot Diaz, Elizabeth Gilbert, Elizabeth Strout, and Meg Wolitzer