Published in 2025
264 pages
Rebecca Hirsch Garcia lives in Ottawa, ON. An O. Henry Award–winning author, she has been published in The Threepenny Review, PRISM international, The Dark, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, The Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories (2023), was the runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and shortlisted for an Ottawa Book Award. Other Evolutions is her debut novel.
What is this book about?
With sharp human insight and unflinching prose, Other Evolutions is Rebecca Hirsch Garcia’s dark, speculative debut, perfect for readers of Iain Reid and Emily St. John Mandel.
Alma Alt, the sheltered youngest daughter of an interfaith, interracial Jewish-Mexican couple, rarely ventures far from her home on a wealthy tree-lined street in Ottawa, where nothing ever happens. The one time she did, striking out to visit her older sister, Marnie, in Montreal, things ended in disaster as she found out that beautiful, blonde Marnie had been lying about their family’s background, trying to pass herself off as white. The fallout from that betrayal leads to a devastating accident, one that claims Alma’s arm and someone’s life.
Alma is now stuck in a holding pattern, unable to move past her grief. But Alma’s life is turned upside down by an encounter just steps from home with an impossible person: the boy she watched die.
Other Evolutions is a literary debut with a dark twist that reveals the uncanny in the mundane, seeing us through the worst parts of our lives toward the weird and wonderful things right in our own backyard.
