In a raw, atmospheric, and keenly observed debut novel, poet and writer Jackie Sabbagh brings us a contemporary coming-of-age story told boy by boy 

As a present-day relationship crisis emerges, it’s clear that the past must be reckoned with at last. It’s time for our heroine to trace her lost loves, to investigate her long-lived desire for the refuge of heterosexuality as a cipher for acceptance, meaning, validity. It’s time to decipher how her gender transition played out across a life of mostly failed relationships—from angel-faced childhood friend to bohemian college crushes to tricks turned while down and out in North Florida. It’s time… for a Transexual Heartbreak Disaster Project.

The project takes us from the tenderness and rage boyhood produces, especially when one isn’t a boy after all; to the ouroboros of anonymous sex shaded with a desire for more; to the spectrum of human relationships between “I became abruptly offended at the insinuation we were separate beings” and “my own indignant wishes that love might come easily and overwhelmingly like it never had.” Along the way, the question remains: why does the heroine’s past loom so large? And where will the end of the project lead her?

Romance is the new religion of our secular age, and our protagonist is a devoted acolyte. But perhaps that devotion could be seen through new eyes. In a beautiful and mordant narrative, Jackie Sabbagh illuminates the dominant emotion of the present day: yearning. TRANSEXUAL HEARTBREAK DISASTER PROJECT represents the arrival of a cutting-edge new talent.