2014 Miami Book Fair | Vanessa Manko

Vanessa Manko earned her MFA in creative writing from Hunter College. She has taught writing at NYU and SUNY Purchase. She has been published in Granta. Her debut novel is The Invention of Exile (Penguin Press; $26.95). Salman Rushdie writes, “The novel reminds one, at times, of Kafka, Ondaatje, and even, in its powerful evocation of marooned isolation, Robinson Crusoe. A brilliant debut.”  Austin Voronkov is many things. He is an engineer, an inventor, an immigrant from Russia to Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1913, where he gets a job at a rifle factory.

At the house where he rents a room, he falls in love with a woman named Julia, who becomes his wife and the mother of his three children. When Austin is wrongly accused of attending anarchist gatherings, his limited grasp of English condemns him to his fate as a deportee, retreating with his new bride to his home in Russia, where he and his young family become embroiled in the Civil War and must flee once again, to Mexico. While Julia and the children are eventually able to return to the U.S., Austin becomes indefinitely stranded in Mexico City because of the black mark on his record.

Austin becomes convinced that his engineering designs will be awarded patents, thereby paving the way for the government to approve his return, and award his long sought-after American citizenship. At the same time, he becomes convinced that an FBI agent is monitoring his every move, with the intent of blocking any possible return to the United States. The novel is based in part on Vanessa Manko’s family history and the life of a grandfather she never knew.

2014 Miami Book Fair