AMERICAN BOOK FEST BEST BOOK AWARD FINALIST PERMAFROST BOOK PRIZE FINALIST CONIUM REVIEW BOOK PRIZE SEMIFINALIST SFWP LITERARY AWARD SHORTLIST “As far as I know, you can only die once…” But when Aetna Simmons disappears from her lonely Bermuda cottage, she leaves behind not one but ten suicide notes. Ten different suicide notes. And no other trace to speak of, not even a corpse, as if she’d never existed. Drafts of a Suicide Note tells the tale of the darkly enigmatic love letter written by Kenji Okada-Caines, a petty criminal who once exposited on English literary classics and now, marooned on his native isle, nurtures an obsession with Aetna’s writing. His murky images of a woman with ten voices and no face launch him into waking nightmares, driving him to confront his lifetime’s worth of failures as a scholar, lover, and opiate addict. His wild conspiracy theories of Aetna as an impostor ten times over lead him to the doorstep of the Japanese mother who turned her back on him—and to the horrifying discovery that the great love of his life isn’t who she seems to be. Kenji’s is a story of dire misunderstandings and the truths we hide even from the ones we love.