Trust Me: A Novel

Coming September 2024

Scott Nadelson's Trust Me is, simply, one of the most affecting novels I've read in years. In the midst of busy days, the book waiting for me on my bedside shelf, I found myself missing these characters—how wise and wounded they are, how silly and confused, how fundamentally human. I was hoping for them. Trust Me is a book that will have you hoping for us all. Lewis and Skye and the river they share will long stay with me.

—Joe Wilkins, author of The Entire Sky and Fall Back Down When I Die

Scott Nadelson has a remarkable ability to let his characters love and laugh and fumble and grow and burn and bleed right on the page. Alternating between the perspective of a recently divorced father and his teenage daughter, we follow two intertwined lives as they each awkwardly find their way. It's a gift to witness the humanity of this story. Trust me.

—Yuvi Zalkow, author of I Only Cry with Emoticons and A Brilliant Novel in the Works

Trust Me is an exquisite novel: tender, funny, and wonderfully absorbing. Nadelson shows us a father and daughter marked by the seasons, pressed to redefine themselves in the world and with each other in luminous, spirited prose.

—Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Dog of the North and The Portable Veblen

Scott Nadelson's Trust Me is tender and impossibly wise, a soulful tapestry of fifty-two moving vignettes depicting the unbreakable yet eternally fraught bonds between fathers and teenage daughters. Watching Lewis and Skye circle one another amid the buffeting waves of adolescence, divorce, isolation, wildfires, and more, Nadelson reminds us (to every parent's chagrin) that the only constant is change. He is a compassionate, witty, and attentive observer of these fundamental familial ties.

--Mark Sarvas, author of Memento Park and Harry, Revised

Trust Me is a quiet, lovely novel about a quiet, lovely space in the woods and a year in the life of a quiet, lovely father-daughter relationship. Scott Nadelson beautifully, movingly sketches the balance between turbulence and poise, wonder and boredom, bravery and vulnerability that is being twelve, or raising someone who is twelve, and perfectly captures the muddled marvel of feeling like a child, while also feeling like an adult, which is true here of both father and daughter and, as we read, maybe all of us.

—Laurie Frankel, author of Family Family and One Two Three