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Table of Contents
About The Book
A stylish, unsettling work of psychological suspense about an American woman, adrift in Mexico for a year, whose chance encounter with a glamorous older expat spirals into obsession and betrayal.
There’s no one, there’s only you.
When Sally, an American living in San Miguel de Allende, meets Louise outside her children’s school, she’s eager to immerse herself more deeply in the life of the city. In Mexico for just a year with her husband, an architect, Sally is entranced by Louise—her elegance, her harshness, her stories about Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac—and the two quickly become inseparable. Soon enough, Louise has begun calling her Mia and, at first playfully, then in earnest, introducing Sally as her daughter to a growing circle of friends.
By turns enthralled with the possibility of a new identity in Mexico and troubled by Louise’s magnetic hold over her, Sally attempts to keep the relationship a secret from her husband. As the specter of Sally’s troubled childhood looms, and Louise’s self-mythologizing tightens its grip, the two women test the limits of reinvention—until their fictions threaten the security of Sally’s flesh-and-blood family.
A taut, beguiling work of psychological suspense, Mia is a mother-daughter story turned on its head and a high-intensity fable about the limitations of playing a role that doesn’t belong to you.
There’s no one, there’s only you.
When Sally, an American living in San Miguel de Allende, meets Louise outside her children’s school, she’s eager to immerse herself more deeply in the life of the city. In Mexico for just a year with her husband, an architect, Sally is entranced by Louise—her elegance, her harshness, her stories about Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac—and the two quickly become inseparable. Soon enough, Louise has begun calling her Mia and, at first playfully, then in earnest, introducing Sally as her daughter to a growing circle of friends.
By turns enthralled with the possibility of a new identity in Mexico and troubled by Louise’s magnetic hold over her, Sally attempts to keep the relationship a secret from her husband. As the specter of Sally’s troubled childhood looms, and Louise’s self-mythologizing tightens its grip, the two women test the limits of reinvention—until their fictions threaten the security of Sally’s flesh-and-blood family.
A taut, beguiling work of psychological suspense, Mia is a mother-daughter story turned on its head and a high-intensity fable about the limitations of playing a role that doesn’t belong to you.
Excerpt
Chapter 1 1
I awake drenched in sweat, alone in the big bed. For long seconds, I don’t understand where I am, what day it is, what season, what country even. In panic, I wonder if my children are in their beds and need my protection—from what? But no, they are nearly grown, taller than me. By the quality of night beneath the streetlights beyond my windows, I gradually realize it’s winter. I’m in Minneapolis. By myself. As I wait for my heart to calm, the dream recalls itself to me. Then, for a long time, I lie thinking of her with a hatred that turns inward, coiling back on itself.
She’s younger in the dream than when I knew her; closer to her mid-forties, the age I am now. I watch her step from the narrow doorway of the mail service into dazzling sunlight, stride up the steep cobbled street on two strong legs. My silver bracelet flashes on her wrist, a package that I know is mine bundled under her arm. When she reaches the corner, where a wrinkled campesina sits on a wooden crate selling roses, she stops. For the duration that good manners stipulate, they exchange pleasantries in a Spanish that I comprehend without any stutter between words and meaning, as though it were my first language. What color? the old campesina asks when at last it’s time to get to business. Orange, the American woman says. Ah, that’s a nice color, says the campesina approvingly, her eyes disappearing within her wrinkles, as the younger woman smiles disdainfully—of course it’s a nice color—gazing down the bridge of her fine nose.
Here the dream shifts. I am suddenly aware of my own presence, my gaze lingering on her face. Like a camera panning closer to its subject, I know now that it’s me dreaming her: her perfect teeth, the lovely angle of her strangely unscarred jaw, her neck. From at once far away and near to her, I feel my heart leap and begin to race as she says, They’re for my daughter, these flowers. And for a single beat—the flicker in which every person is capable of self-deception—I am suffused with extravagant joy. She’s remembered me! She’s gotten me a gift!
I awake drenched in sweat, alone in the big bed. For long seconds, I don’t understand where I am, what day it is, what season, what country even. In panic, I wonder if my children are in their beds and need my protection—from what? But no, they are nearly grown, taller than me. By the quality of night beneath the streetlights beyond my windows, I gradually realize it’s winter. I’m in Minneapolis. By myself. As I wait for my heart to calm, the dream recalls itself to me. Then, for a long time, I lie thinking of her with a hatred that turns inward, coiling back on itself.
She’s younger in the dream than when I knew her; closer to her mid-forties, the age I am now. I watch her step from the narrow doorway of the mail service into dazzling sunlight, stride up the steep cobbled street on two strong legs. My silver bracelet flashes on her wrist, a package that I know is mine bundled under her arm. When she reaches the corner, where a wrinkled campesina sits on a wooden crate selling roses, she stops. For the duration that good manners stipulate, they exchange pleasantries in a Spanish that I comprehend without any stutter between words and meaning, as though it were my first language. What color? the old campesina asks when at last it’s time to get to business. Orange, the American woman says. Ah, that’s a nice color, says the campesina approvingly, her eyes disappearing within her wrinkles, as the younger woman smiles disdainfully—of course it’s a nice color—gazing down the bridge of her fine nose.
Here the dream shifts. I am suddenly aware of my own presence, my gaze lingering on her face. Like a camera panning closer to its subject, I know now that it’s me dreaming her: her perfect teeth, the lovely angle of her strangely unscarred jaw, her neck. From at once far away and near to her, I feel my heart leap and begin to race as she says, They’re for my daughter, these flowers. And for a single beat—the flicker in which every person is capable of self-deception—I am suffused with extravagant joy. She’s remembered me! She’s gotten me a gift!
About The Author
Photo by Claire Vermillion
Leslie Bazzett’s fiction debuted in the New England Review. Subsequent work has appeared in NER, Virginia Quarterly Review, Carolina Quarterly, West Branch, and The Louisville Review, among other places. One of her stories in NER received “Special Mention” in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and another was listed as “Notable” in The Best American Short Stories. She has been a finalist for a Rona Jaffe Award and a recipient of the NER Award for Emerging Writers. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband, poet Michael Bazzett, and their two children. Mia is her debut novel.
Product Details
- Publisher: Scribner (August 11, 2026)
- Length: 320 pages
- ISBN13: 9781668227329
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Raves and Reviews
"Bazzett skillfully evokes languid, sun-drenched afternoons in San Miguel that contrast with "colorless, brutally cold" Minneapolis winters...A mesmerizing novel infused with a sense of foreboding, Mia invites readers to ponder the costs to authenticity when living in denial of the past"
—Shelf Awareness, starred review
"In measured beats, Bazzett explores the dark side of indulging in fantasies, however benign. It amounts to a singular take on the folie à deux that leaves the reader pondering the nature of obsession and the line between fate and free will."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Bazzett’s debut is a beautifully written novel of love, loss, and longing. Peppered with vivid descriptions of small-town Mexico, Bazzett’s prose is at once gorgeous and harsh, and her characters jump off the page..."
—Booklist, starred review
"Leslie Bazzett's Mia is an extraordinary debut novel. Taut, lush, and mysterious, Mia is an exceptionally intelligent psychological thriller in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith. It is also a deft and honest examination of motherhood and marriage. You won't read a better suspense novel this summer."
—Nickolas Butler, author of Shotgun Lovesongs and Godspeed
"Titled, aptly, after a character who does not exist, Leslie Bazzett’s Mia is about the search for a mother, the search for a daughter, the search for a missing-in-action self. Bazzett explores obsession and privilege in this fraught story built around an unsettled past and an unsettling present, in which the constant is the elegance and depth of Bazzett’s hypnotic prose. Mia is a beautifully observed psychological thriller that burns slowly then explodes."
—Lori Ostlund, author of Are You Happy?
“In this extraordinary debut novel, Leslie Bazzett invites us to the expatriate community of San Miguel de Allende, then drops us head first into a personal labyrinth in which a mother walks the fine line between good friendship and borderline obsession. Any woman who has sought a bit of reinvention will find Sally and Louise’s relationship is as familiar as it is strange. In a voice reminiscent of Deborah Levy and Rachel Cusk, Bazzett has crafted a slow burn that, in the end, fully ignites and surprises. Mia is a great read.”
—Katie Crouch, New York Times bestselling author of Embassy Wife
“Mia is a sharp, intimate novel — a warning against the seductions of self-reinvention and the cost of losing one’s identity to another. Reading Mia feels like building a house of cards in open air: delicate, luminous, and doomed.”
—Martha McPhee, author of Omega Farm and An Elegant Woman
"Intense, immersive, and utterly gripping, Mia is a boldly original thriller that reads like a classic. Centering on a fateful obsession between two women that shakes a young family's seemingly solid foundation, Mia is sure to be a standout of the season—and beyond."
—Laura Sims, author of The Man
“Nimbly plotted and flawlessly written, Mia is a chilling story of mothers and daughters both real and imagined. Leslie Bazzett’s debut novel is an evocative, suspenseful heir to Patricia Highsmith’s best work.”
—Teddy Wayne, author of The Au Pair and The Winner
"In Mia, a chance connection in Mexico becomes a slow unmaking. Leslie Bazzett slyly traces how intimacy can slide into influence, and influence into disappearance. This is a mesmerizing burn of a novel, in which desire and dependency blur the boundaries of identity."
—Hannah Pittard, author of We Are Too Many and If You Love It, Let It Kill You
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