The Falls of Us
About
Literary Titan Silver Award Winner
Readers’ Favorite 5-Star Review
“Each story has a meaningful message and invites readers to pause.”
—Danelle Petersen for Readers’ Favorite
The hardest part is not always what happened. Sometimes it is what comes after.
In The Falls of Us, E. M. Fowler explores private pain and public judgment—the stories people tell to survive, the silence others demand, and the consequences neither can erase.
A teenage girl carries the shame of abuse within a rigid religious community, while her father struggles between his lost standing and his love for her. An aging woman moves through the shifting reality of dementia. A marriage strains beneath betrayal and denial. A woman of faith struggles with the truth behind the testimony others expect her to tell. Elsewhere, a simple breach of etiquette carries a devastating price.
Across eighteen literary short stories, Black characters confront manipulation, faith, memory, and the expectations that shape whose pain is acknowledged and whose voice is heard. Some bend the truth. Some challenge the rules. Others must live with what remains.
Blending literary prose with speculative twists, The Falls of Us brings together microfiction, flash fiction, and full-length short stories that question how we judge one another—and what those judgments cost.
Praise for this book
Fowler is especially good at turning physical objects and ordinary situations into extensions of a character’s inner life. “Water Damage” makes a worsening leak and repeated coats of paint part of a woman’s determination to cover over the collapse of her marriage. “The Blue Curtains” uses a dimmed home and an unreliable narrator to gradually reveal how a mother is shaping her daughter’s view of her father. In “Fragments,” memory itself becomes unstable as the story enters the confusion of dementia, while “The Quiet Never Comes” captures workplace exhaustion through a woman who longs so badly for silence that even escape starts to feel unreachable. The collection’s strongest moments often come when Fowler lets a concrete image do the emotional work. A stain, a ledge, a prayer closet, a pair of curtains, or a disabled car can carry far more weight than its literal purpose suggests.
I really enjoyed the flow of this book. It has the kind of writing that makes you forget you are reading. I could just stay with it and let the story move along without feeling like I was working through the pages. The pacing felt natural, and I liked how the details came together without everything being explained too much. It pulled me in quietly and kept me there. By the time I finished, it felt less like I had read a book and more like I had spent some time inside its world.
I really liked this collection. Each story feels different, but they all have this underlying sense of people dealing with things that don’t simply disappear. The writing flows really well, and I found myself getting pulled into the stories without having to work through them. Some of the themes are heavy, especially around faith, memory, relationships, and loss, but they’re handled in a way that feels very human. A thoughtful collection with some stories that definitely stayed with me after I finished reading.
Thought-provoking and inspirational, The Falls of Us studies human nature, our choices, and how we deal with them in the aftermath. […] Each story has a meaningful message and invites readers to pause. Offering food for thought, The Falls of Us is a book you don’t want to miss!