Miss Me Forever by Eugene Cross
Tulsi Gurung arrives in Pennsylvania on a day so impossibly damp and gray he wonders if he’s landed on the underside of the world. He is sixteen and brimming with wonder and fear. Born and raised in Refugee Camp Goldhap, Tulsi is technically a refugee from Bhutan, a land he’s never set eyes on.
Reunited with his grandfather, Tulsi struggles to navigate his new life, his new country, and a raw separation from his beloved sister, Susmita, the one person who truly tethers him to the world.
Haunted by the uncertainty of her fate, Tulsi attempts to move on, forging relationships with the unfamiliar characters he encounters: a youth pastor’s wife suffering a crisis of faith, a guarded transfer student with a mysterious past, a single mother with whom Tulsi glimpses a future brighter than he’d ever imagined. But the past will not rest, and Tulsi finds he must heal the wound of Susmita’s loss and track down the sister he left behind.
Publication Date: November 14, 2023
Paperback: 248 pages
ISBN: 9781950539789
PRAISE FOR MISS ME FOREVER
“Miss Me Forever is an elegy for all exiled people yearning to find a home and place to belong. This is a heartbreaking yet hopeful story of love, familial bonds, generational trauma, and determination penned by a writer of rare grace and dignity. With this novel, Eugene Cross has created a wholly unique perspective on the immigrant experience, one with enough power and poignancy to ripple across oceans, nations, and time itself.”
—Alex Espinoza, author of Still Water Saints and The Five Acts of Diego León
“With Miss Me Forever, Cross fixes a compassionate and unapologetic gaze upon Tulsi Gurung, “a refugee from a place he has never seen.” In America, where things are bigger than they are elsewhere, particularly loss and heartache, Tulsi builds himself an emotional safe house anchored by four immutable devotions: love for his grandfather, search for his sister, mastery over his own story, and a new language in which to state his case. The journey is both utterly moving and utterly compelling. In a country made up of refugee stories, Tulsi’s voyage into a future that can contain and transcend his past stands out. An exceptional novel from one of our best.”
—Ru Freeman, author of A Disobedient Girl and Bon Courage
“Miss Me Forever is a coming-of-age story, a refugee story, a love story and a family story, all wrapped up in honest, heart-felt writing that sheds an important light on the realities of being an outsider in this country. A thoroughly compelling novel filled with beautiful and effective subtleties, which is why one might not realize, until the final page, the somewhat ontological questions the story had raised, chiefly: what is “family” when you don’t have any left? And what makes you you when everything you had has been taken away?”
—Nami Mun, author of Miles from Nowhere
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eugene Cross is the author of the story collection Fires of Our Choosing, which was named the Gold Medal winner in the Short Story category by the Independent Publisher Book Awards. He's taught creative writing at Northwestern, Penn State, The University of Chicago, and other institutions. His stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, Story Quarterly, and Callaloo, among other publications. His work was also listed among the 2010 and 2015 Best American Short Stories' 100 Distinguished Stories. He is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and fellowships from NBC, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, the Yaddo Artists' Colony, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Eugene writes for TV and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three children.
