Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist [Paperback]

A Finalist for the PEN/ Faulkner Award

n Amazon Best Book of the Year

AWashington PostNotable Book

A Barnes & Noble Discover Pick

One ofBustle's Most Important Books of 2016

Named Most Anticipated Book of the Year inWall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly, TIME, Huffington Post, The Chicago Tribune, BuzzFeed, Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, Orlando Sentinel, Ploughshares, Bustle, TheMillions,BookRiot, The Oregonian, The San Diego Union-Tribune, River City Reading, Indigo

Grief-stricken after his mother's death and three years of wandering the world, Victor is longing for a family and a sense of purpose. He believes he's found both when he returns home to Seattle only to be swept up in a massive protest. With young, biracial Victor o one side of the barricades and his estranged father--the white chief of police--on the opposite, the day descends into chaos, capturing in its confusion the activists, police, bystanders, and citizens from all around the world who'd arrived that day brimming with hope. By the day's end, they have all committed acts they never thought possible.

As heartbreaking as it is pulse-pounding, Yapa's virtuosic debut asks profound questions about the power of empathy in our hyper-connected modern world, and the limits of compassion, all while exploring how far we must go for family, for justice, and for love.



Sunil Yapa received his MFA from Hunter College, where he was awarded the Alumni Scholarship & Welfare Fund Fellowship and was selected twice as the Esquire Fiction Intern. In June 2010, he won the Asian American Short Story Award. In May 2010, Yapa was the writer-in-residence at the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The son of a Sri Lankan father, and a mother from Montana, Yapa grew up in Pennsylvania, and has since traveled and lived inló