The Falling Maria
a novel by Yasuko Thanh
A LYRICAL, MULTI-LAYERED TALE FROM THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF TO THE BRIDGE
In 1920, Maria Mandapat, veteran female WWI fighter pilot and international celebrity, is tried and executed for murder. But as Maria hangs, at the very moment the noose tightens on Earth, her soul continues its journey, slipping right through her stockings and out the soles of her shoes. She finds herself seated on a train—to heaven.
The afterlife is unlike any heaven Maria ever expected. It is a dreary bureaucracy little distinguishable from Earth’s, populated by busybody angels, well-meaning but ineffectual saints, and the listless dregs of souls waiting in futility for promised salvation. Maria, a controversial figure in death and in life, is quickly put on trial—but this time, St. Adelaide of Rome, patron saint of abused women, has taken a personal interest in Maria’s case, as her heavenly trial is not for the crime of murder, but for a much graver sin.
The Falling Maria explores themes of motherhood, suffering, and freedom, delving into the tension between dirtiness and holiness, right and wrong, disobedience and survival, and the lives of the forgotten. It serves as a meditation on suffering and an exploration of the bonds between mothers and daughters across generations, examining the connections that tie us—umbilical cords and nooses alike. The novel engages with the many meanings of falling: falling from God, from grace, through the air, into death, and toward a form of holiness and liberation.
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55,000 words
Manuscript available Spring 2026
RIGHTS SOLD
Canada: Hamish Hamilton, Spring 2027
PRAISE FOR TO THE BRIDGE (2023)
"Yasuko Thanh has done it again! To the Bridge grabs you by the throat and pulls you under the surface of every parent’s greatest fear. From the novel’s opening line, her characters crash off the page and into the imagination—raw, riven, utterly real—in prose that still finds grace and wonder amid life’s long shadows and a narrator who aches with a mother’s unrelenting love." —David Leach, author of Fatal Tide and Chasing Utopia
“In passages of dialogue, the rhythms of speech are true-to-life; the pace is electric; the complex subject of adolescent suicide is demanding and dramatic. To the Bridge demonstrates empathy for the characters, paying serious attention to trauma yet revealing a capacity for lyricism in the midst of despair…. Yasuko Thanh has written a tough evocative encounter with the tremors of change.” —The British Columbia Review
“To the Bridge is the painstaking unpacking of a mother's heart. It asks a question, loaded with maternal baggage, that any woman with a child in crisis asks: 'Am I a good mother?' And the answer is a sumptuous unravelling of the ties that bind. Yasuko Thanh's prose is unassuming, understated, then all at once leaves you gasping for breath.” —Antonio Michael Downing, author of Saga Boy
“Sex and drugs have been outed as almost universal rites of passage. But suicide: what would you do if your child wanted to kill herself because she was too happy? This wild and sobering novel may well be the one book on parenting you will ever need.” —Susan Musgrave, author of Exculpatory Lilies
(Photo: Don Denton)
ABOUT YASUKO THANH
Yasuko’s story collection Floating Like the Dead was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2012 and was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award and the B.C. Book Prize for Fiction. One story in it won an Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Short Story. The title story won the Journey Prize for the best story published in Canada in 2009. Quill and Quire named Floating Like the Dead a best book of the year. CBC hailed Yasuko Thanh one of ten writers to watch in 2013. Her debut novel Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains, inspired by the history of her father’s family in French Indochina, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize for the best novel of 2016, and her memoir, Mistakes to Run With, was a national bestseller. Her latest novel, To the Bridge, made the Audible Best of 2023 list. Yasuko lives in Victoria, B.C., with her two children.
PRAISE FOR THE WORKS OF YASUKO THANH
“There is much in Mistakes to Run With to ponder about sacrifice, human nature, and acceptance.” —BC BOOKLOOK
“On rare occasions, you read a book that gives you the sense it had to be written, that the impulse to get these words on the page was more about necessity than choice. Books such as those are full of passion, pain and urgency, and offer the kind of triumph you feel lucky to witness. Mistakes to Run With is one such book – it feels driven by the compulsion to document, by the urgent human desire to be heard. And when every detail has been shared, every unvarnished truth thoughtfully relayed, Thanh makes you want to stand up and cheer the accomplishment.”
—THE GLOBE AND MAIL
“Deft touches of magical realism lend this story of love, obligation, and sabotage the mysterious aura referenced in the title.” — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review
“Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains will carry you away with the startling clarity of it language—you will almost forget you are reading at all. Until, that is, you are drawn up short by the uncanny sense that this book is not really about the past at all … that it is instead directly addressing you, the reader.” — JOHANNA SKIBSRUD, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of The Sentimentalists
“Sweeping yet intimate, Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains is a novel in which not a single, haunting detail is trivial, and a devastating edginess straddles what is intoxicating, astonishing, and at once ancient and contemporary. Yasuko Thanh has rendered a richly imagined narrative of five men plotting, drinking, dreaming of poison against the fascinating backdrop of colonialism and revolution, where ghosts, superstition, love, and insanity seethe. This is a book to be savoured, thought about, and discussed—a book to be remembered.” — ALEXANDRA CURRY, author of The Courtesan