‘Goodnight Stranger’: Featured Fiction from Miciah Bay Gault

In today’s installment of featured fiction—curated by our own Carolyn Quimby—we present an excerpt from Miciah Bay Gault’s novel, Goodnight Stranger, out today from Park Row—and recently longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

Booklist called Goodnight Stranger “Quietly chilling…A suspenseful meditation on the many ways in which the past, consciously or not, shapes the present.” And George Saunders hailed the book as a “taut, keenly intelligent, and provocative debut…Deeply compelling and enjoyable, suffused with a genuinely thrilling new mode of literary energy.”

Goodnight Stranger

I left work early. I walked quickly as if chased. I wasn’t sure what I was running from, or to. All I knew was that