Mistranslation with Madeleine Moss (U Iowa Press, 2026)

In upstate New York in 2001, nine-year-old twins Sabina and Camilla spend the summer weathering the moods of their erratic mother while finding themselves pulled toward diverging interests: Sabina into the mystery of their absent French father and Camilla into burgeoning popularity. But their lives are shaken up by the arrival of an Arab French family across the street. Thrilled by what she sees as a link to the country of her origins, Sabina attempts to befriend the family’s son, Khalil, and is rebuffed for reasons she doesn’t understand. Yet as the twins and Khalil come of age, they are drawn into a tense and ever-shifting triangular dynamic. As Sabina strives to find her father and make sense of her mother, as Camilla confronts whether the power she held in youth translates to adulthood, and as Khalil reckons with the psychological fallout of a family tragedy, their paths converge in ways both surprising and inevitable. Bookended by events with global resonance, Mistranslation (U Iowa Press, 2026) is a continent-spanning chronicle of family, inheritance, and the reverberations of the choices we do—or don’t—make. Madeleine Moss grew up in Ithaca, New York, and holds a degree in French literature from Cornell University. She received her MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis in 2020 and currently lives in Strasbourg, France.