NO ONE'S LEAVING
A young woman travels through Europe in the late nineties after she learns of her ex-girlfriend's suicide, whose ghost follows her around. She meets an array of people, including a tarot reader, a gay farmer, an expat trans woman, and a French lesbian with a dreamy pit bull. Discovering new love and friendship while remembering the struggles of her past relationship, the story weaves between the narrator's present-day adventures and coming-of-age love, sewn together by existential conversations with the ghost of her ex.
No One’s Leaving is curated to a soundtrack of Gen X music—from Jane's Addiction to The Cranberries to PJ Harvey—and touches on themes of queer love, heartbreak, grief, and mental health.
Fiction/ 978-1-963115-24-6/ February 4, 2025
A young woman travels through Europe in the late nineties after she learns of her ex-girlfriend's suicide, whose ghost follows her around. She meets an array of people, including a tarot reader, a gay farmer, an expat trans woman, and a French lesbian with a dreamy pit bull. Discovering new love and friendship while remembering the struggles of her past relationship, the story weaves between the narrator's present-day adventures and coming-of-age love, sewn together by existential conversations with the ghost of her ex.
No One’s Leaving is curated to a soundtrack of Gen X music—from Jane's Addiction to The Cranberries to PJ Harvey—and touches on themes of queer love, heartbreak, grief, and mental health.
Fiction/ 978-1-963115-24-6/ February 4, 2025
A young woman travels through Europe in the late nineties after she learns of her ex-girlfriend's suicide, whose ghost follows her around. She meets an array of people, including a tarot reader, a gay farmer, an expat trans woman, and a French lesbian with a dreamy pit bull. Discovering new love and friendship while remembering the struggles of her past relationship, the story weaves between the narrator's present-day adventures and coming-of-age love, sewn together by existential conversations with the ghost of her ex.
No One’s Leaving is curated to a soundtrack of Gen X music—from Jane's Addiction to The Cranberries to PJ Harvey—and touches on themes of queer love, heartbreak, grief, and mental health.
Fiction/ 978-1-963115-24-6/ February 4, 2025
Praise for NO ONE’S LEAVING
Raki Kopernik’s debut novel, No One’s Leaving, is a grief narrative unlike any other I’ve read. It manages to be devastatingly painful, haunted with heartache, and also sidesplittingly funny, full of kindness, queerness, and warmth. Gritty and honest as a Patti Smith song, No One’s Leaving is a story about travel, about the love of strangers, about letting go and starting again. Kopernik’s keen insights on love and loss are profound. Each line, sharp and true.
—- —Alissa Hattman, author of Sift
No One's Leaving exists in the liminal spaces between life and death, truth and fiction, pain and healing. Throughout the narrator's fevered journey across Europe and the US after the suicide of her ex, we become unable to separate ourselves from her so that her meditations, her hauntings, her travels become our own. Confessional, raw, and poetic, this is a novel that dazzles the reader from a writer exercising her full power.
—Darci Schummer, author of Six Months in the Midwest
Ethereal and atmospheric, Kopernik's prose seamlessly weaves together the memories of a haunting love and a present unraveling adventure. As the narrator embarks on a journey to heal from the past, she contemplates loss—all its pain and suffering—and finds an opportunity for introspection, deep reflection and meditation. No One's Leaving is a fever dream of grief, an eloquent song of trauma and rebirth.
—Brittany Ackerman, author of The Perpetual Motion Machine and The Brittanys
Full of portals to the past and passageways forward, No One's Leaving is an underground-guidebook-cum-queer-odyssey traversing loss and the many I's grief sheds. Charting a journey from hostels to ferries to farmfields to yurts to hitched rides, Raki Kopernik's crisp and clear storytelling is charmed and generous, like the eyes of love, showing us how to trust ourselves, how to move through blue, how to surrender and sync with the rhythm of the living even when haunted by the dead, and how to start, again and again and again.
—Elisabeth Workman, author of Ultramegaprairieland and Endlessness Is No Desolation
About RAKI KOPERNIK
Raki is a first generation American, queer, Jewish writer. She is the author of The Things You Left and The Memory House, both Minnesota Book Award finalists. Her work has appeared in numerous publications and has been shortlisted and nominated for several other awards, including the Pushcart Prize for Fiction and the Pen Faulkner Award in Fiction. She is a fiction editor at MAYDAY Magazine and teaches creative writing at The Minneapolis College of Art and Design. You can find her at rakikopernik.com and follow on Instagram @rakikopernik
