Debra Spark,
Author

Books

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Notable
  • Finalist, Maine Literary Awards, 2017
  • Winner, 2017 Read ME: picked as the fiction title for a summer reading program sponsored by Maine Humanities Council and Maine State Libraries
  • Honorable Mention, New England Book Festival Prize, General Fiction, 2016

Unknown Caller​

Novel. LA: Louisiana State University (Yellow Shoe Fiction Series), 2016.

Beginning with an aggravating phone call, a strange request, and the sudden disappearance of a mother and her daughter, Unknown Caller moves backwards in time and across several continents to tell a funny, moving, and genuinely surprising story about families, misunderstandings, secrets, falls from grace, and chances for redemption.

Praise

“In Colby College professor Debra Spark’s Unknown Caller, a sharply hooked premise and well-conceived structure drive the considerable emotional suspense. Set partly in Maine, the novel tracks the fallout of a 2 a.m. phone call in which a doctor’s ex-wife informs him of the arrival by plane of the 17-year-old daughter he has never met.”
—New York Times Book Review

“A book of candor and complexity that captures human relations with heart-rending accuracy.”
—Kirkus Review

“A+++ writing.”
—Liberty Hardy, “All the Books” podcast, Book Riot

“…a story that crosses decades and two marriages, and elegantly combines a family drama and a suspense thriller.”
—Book Page: “What We’re Reading” 

“We fans of Debra Spark’s work love her dearly for her rich characters, dazzlingly complex emotional landscapes, and gentle irony. I’m glad to say that all of these things are found in joyous abundance in Unknown Caller, which advances its human entanglements in the oblique way that a jigsaw puzzle comes together–a piece of blue sky here, a curl of a sail there–until, voilà, we find ourselves holding the whole picture in our hands.”
—Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies and Aracadia

Unknown Caller is a kaleidoscopic, wide-ranging novel about the fragility and durability of family and the near impossibility of knowing the truth about even the people closest to us. Moving unpredictably across the decades, Debra Spark illuminates the secret histories of her characters with uncommon insight and compassion.”
—Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers

“When I finished this book, I wanted to start over and see all the little clues I might have missed, but I was also jealous of my former self for getting to read it the first time.”
—Mary Laura Philpott, Parnassus Books