Why is Marigold?

Title: Why is Marigold?
Author: Sarah Colombo

Available Now

Barnes & Noble
Bookshop
Amazon
Waterstones
Powell’s
Books A Million

Marigold was created for a reason, she’s just not sure what that reason is.

An android, Marigold was raised at the Evangeline School for Girls on the Gulf Coast. Now an adult, she works on her creator’s compound, a desalination plant.

One day, Tom—a wandering human searching for a way to exist in peace—arrives at the compound. Soon, Tom is part of Marigold’s family, another reluctant adoptee of her creator. As Tom and Marigold bond, he reveals that he remembers Marigold from somewhere in his murky past. But, she doesn’t remember him at all.

As they unwind a web of their past connections, Marigold and Tom discover the reason for Marigold’s creation… and the mysterious circumstances surrounding Tom’s father’s death.

*Cover Art by Rachel Evans*

ISBN: 978-1-951393-38-0
Price: $15.95 (paperback), $4.99 (ebook)
Release date: November 2024

Praise for Why is Marigold?

“Set in a permanently impermanent world of trailers and camp sites, storm shelters and Dollar Stores, all in the grip of one vast company store, Why is Marigold? asks: What is human? What is possible? What is messing with nature? What is love? as one question that can’t be answered or even quite asked. A lovely and disturbing novel.”
— Carola Dibbell, author of The Only Ones, 2015 Favorite Books of the Year (Bustle, O, The Oprah Magazine); Best science fiction and fantasy books of 2015 (The Washington Post)

“Why is Marigold? by Sarah Colombo is a magical book that delights in shocking play, both with narrative structure as well as reader expectations. Corporate weirdness, gorgeous wilds, and the ever-present feeling of mystery. These are aspects of Florida in our consciousness and Colombo stokes this sense of place to create a novel intriguing, compelling, and yet also very human.”
— Jordan A. Rothacker, author of The Shrieking of Nothing

“With prose that elegantly chops up and spreads disquiet and wonder across every page, Colombo’s Why Is Marigold? is an exploration of the deep-heart center of humanity’s exhaustive experience––this thing we call ‘reality.’ Both on an individual level and on a universal level of ‘the unspoken.’ Like Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (and A), but set in a world teetering on the edge of unraveling. Poignant, sincere, messy, kaleidoscopic. Brilliant.”
— Tex Gresham, author of Violent Candy and Sunflower