Kristen Millares Young

Description:

“Thrilled to have this explosive and daring collection in my hands. More, please.”— Luis Alberto Urrea, Pulitzer Prize finalist, author of The Devil’s Highway

Desire Lines is a fearless, lyric memoir-in-essays in which Kristen Millares Young excavates her matrilineage and the submerged histories of the divine feminine, blending personal narrative, mythology, and cultural critique to reclaim women’s voices, maternal power, and selfhood across generations. 

In her debut memoir, award-winning novelist and journalist Kristen Millares Young seeks possibilities for women’s liberation amid the ongoing erosion of our human rights. Desire Lines excavates submerged truths about motherhood, the body, and the sacred.

Desire Lines takes its title from footpaths—of necessity, defiance and longing—that emerge next to the routes that were planned for us. Challenging herself to be a mother unlike what she has known, Millares Young centers her own body as a site of resistance and making.

Tracing her matrilineage from Cuba to Spain, Millares Young uncovers the remnants of a pagan cult whose mother goddess, Cybele, was erased to make way for the Virgin Mary. But Cybele was no virgin.

On the edge of an impasse, written as both invitation and veil, Desire Lines reclaims the power siphoned from women’s stories, wielding the lyric essay for awakening consciousness.

ADVANCED PRAISE

“Kristen Millares Young will take readers along on her journey of discovery as she publishes her debut memoir this year.” 
—PEOPLE Magazine in its exclusive cover reveal and interview: “With Desire Lines, I hope to show the beauty and freedom we make possible when we refuse to abandon our truths.” 

Desire Lines was named a “Most Anticipated Feminist Book of 2026” by Ms. Magazine

“Kristen Millares Young’s debut memoir explores womanhood, motherhood, liberation and embodiment with an eye toward uncovering truths that awaken and enlighten.” 
—Ms. Magazine

“In Desire Lines, Kristen Millares Young explores womanhood, human rights, and identity with a moral imperative and artistry that few writers achieve. She is an immense literary talent, and this remarkable book should be read by all.”
—Brandon Hobson, National Book Award finalist, author of The Devil is a Southpaw, The Removed and Where the Dead Sit Talking

“These emotionally gripping essays delve into the complexities of familial love and obligation. Kristen Millares Young seamlessly weaves together personal experience, historical research, mythology, and cultural critique in a memoir that feels both timely and timeless. Her prose is alive with style and poetic lyricism.”
—Weike Wang, winner of PEN/Hemingway and Whiting awards, author of Chemistry and Joan is Okay

“In this tremendous memoir, Kristen Millares Young grips the reader’s hand and leads us into the terrifying place where all life comes from. She is intrepid, incisive. Generous and unsparing is her consideration of mothering, the ordinary and glorious act that keeps the world renewing itself. I loved this book.” 
—Elissa Washuta, PEN/Open Book Award finalist, author of White Magic and My Body is a Book of Rules

“Kristen Millares Young is a fearless woman who will go places other writers might fear to tread. I have admired her fierce honesty and craft for a long time and am thrilled to have this explosive and daring memoir in my hands. More, please.” 
—Luis Alberto Urrea, Pulitzer Prize finalist, author of The Devil’s Highway

“Kristen Millares Young brings a searching, generous, and unrelenting gaze to every subject she writes on, most of all herself.” 
—Melissa Febos, National Book Critics Circle Award winner, author of Girlhood and The Dry Season

“Kristen Millares Young’s memoir Desire Lines is a sage instruction manual for how to choose love over harm, joy over despair, art over ruin. Strength and affection shine from every page. In a patriarchal world that seeks to break us, this is a defiant and triumphant howl of wholeness, both electrifying and healing.”
—Sharma Shields, Washington State Book Award winner, author of The Cassandra

Description:

Subduction is a lyric retelling of the troubled history of encounter in the Americas.

Fleeing the shattered remains of her marriage and treachery by her sister, a Latina anthropologist named Claudia takes refuge in Neah Bay, a Native whaling village on the jagged Pacific coast. Claudia yearns to lose herself to the songs of the tribe and the secrets of a spirited hoarder named Maggie. Instead, she stumbles into Maggie’s prodigal son Peter, who, spurred by his mother’s failing memory, has returned seeking answers to his father’s murder. Claudia helps Peter’s family convey a legacy delayed for decades by that death, but her presence, echoing centuries of fraught contact with indigenous peoples, brings lasting change and real damage. Through the ardent collision of Peter and Claudia, Subduction portrays not only their strange allegiance after grievous losses but also their shared hope of finding solace and community on the Makah Indian Reservation. An intimate tale of stunning betrayals, Subduction bears witness to the power of stories to disrupt—and to heal.

AWARDS AND DISTINCTIONS

*Finalist for two International Latino Book Awards
*Selected as a Staff Pick by The Paris Review
*Shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award
*Finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award (Multicultural)
*SILVER MEDAL winner in the Independent Publisher Book Awards in Multicultural Fiction

ADVANCE PRAISE

“The brilliance of Subduction only suggests the wonders to come. It is a good day for us when Kristen Millares Young puts pen to paper. Highly recommended.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, winner of the American Book Award and author of The House of Broken Angels

“In this commanding novel, Kristen Millares Young captures the brutality of an anthropological gaze upon a Makah community. Her complex, exquisitely shaped characters embody the calamity of intrusion and the beauty of resilience.”—Elissa Washuta (Cowlitz), author of My Body is a Book of Rules (Red Hen Press) and Starvation Mode

“Young beautifully and vividly renders the Pacific Northwest, particularly the unique world of Neah Bay. Subduction is at once a thought-provoking meditation on the geography and geology of the natural world and a generous exploration of the natural shifts and movements that shape her characters.”—Jonathan Evison New York Times bestselling author, Lawn Boy, This is Your Life Harriet Chance!, West of Here, All About Lulu, and The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving

“With dreamlike, salt-water-laced prose that feels born of the Salish Sea, Kristen Millares Young’s Subduction lyrically examines relationships strained and forged by place and belonging. Intelligently addressing womanhood, community, lust, and loss, this is a novel as deep as it is intoxicating, as intricate as it is powerful. Like Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Subduction is a novel to be celebrated for both its poetry and wisdom.”—Sharma Shields, author of The Cassandra (Henry Holt 2019)

“Kristen Millares Young’s Subduction is the powerful debut novel from a writer that comes to us fully formed. This book is as unforgettable as it is timely, a story that keeps us riveted from beginning to end, written with abundant grace and lyric intensity. Beautiful, smart, and urgent. Read this book now.”—Robert Lopez, author of Good People, Kamby Bolongo Mean River, Part of the World, All Back Full, Asunder

“Kristen Millares Young’s Subduction is a taut, atmospheric tale that gave me what I hope for in a novel: characters that I can care about, in a place that seems real, with stakes that really matter. This is an enormously impressive debut. I’ll eagerly await more from this writer.”—Steve Yarbrough, PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist, winner of a Richard Wright Award and a California Book Award, author of The Unmade World, The Realm of Last Chances, The End of California, Prisoners of War.

“Subduction will give you a sense of life lived in the most remote corner of the lower 48, the Makah reservation in Washington State. The ever-changing Pacific Ocean, the emerald forests, the geoduck clams, and the scruffy sea-scoured dwellings are merely the foundation of Kristen Millares Young’s suspenseful, atmospheric first novel. The characters leap off the page and into your heart. I wanted to swallow the story whole, and I was happy to know it would take time to savor it. An auspicious debut!”—Patricia Henley, National Book Award Finalist, author of Hummingbird House, In the River Sweet, and Other Heartbreaks

“‘Love is a kind of home,’ Kristen Millares Young writes in Subduction. But in the world of this beautifully written novel, home is also a place of secrets, murder, and loss. A tale of taking and giving, resistance and surrender, Subduction raises troubling, provocative questions about our struggle to belong.”—Samuel Ligon, author of Miller Cane, Among the Dead and Dreaming, Safe in Heaven Dead

“Set in the Pacific Northwest, Subduction is a lyrical forest of storytelling rooted in indigenous voices and invaded by those who would steal the tongues and hearts of the ones they love while bartering and betraying the idea of belonging to a land, a birthright, and a family. When you read Kristen Millares Young’s words, you understand how it is we can steal, can betray, can love.”—Shawn Wong, author of Homebase and American Knees

“Subduction introduces a welcome new voice in Kristen Millares Young, here telling a taut, fraught story of two people who meet and engage in circumstances that surprise. Both have lived but are seeking to live yet more fully, even as they’re beset by their pasts. Whether the way to such realization is with the other is a core part of this vividly written story. Set on Makah Nation land, part of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, Subduction is a searching exploration of historic legacies in the present day. The result: a book of reckoning, full-heartedly told.”—Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company