Every year, there are a handful of books I read that I have heard about long before their publication date. It’s not because the publishers have a huge marketing budget; it’s because all the cool people on Twitter and Instagram are talking about them (without needing to be paid to do so).

This year, Ruth Madievsky’s debut novel, ALL-NIGHT PHARMACY, was one of those books that had been buzzed about for months, so I was eager to finally get my hands on a copy. When I cracked it open, I found it difficult to put down, and I was thinking about it even when I wasn’t reading it. Maybe my appreciation for the novel doesn’t exactly make me one of the cool people, but I do see what they’re raving about.

"This is a wild, unconventional character study, but it’s also a powerful exploration of what it means to live in relationship to others --- as a sister, a lover or a sympathetic stranger."

When we meet Madievsky’s unnamed narrator, she has just graduated from high school. The narrator’s older sister, Debbie --- who has been more or less estranged from the family since her parents found out she was working as a stripper --- takes her younger sister out for a night on the town. She introduces her to a world where few things are as they seem, an effect that is heightened when they take a handful of unidentified pills.

Over the subsequent months, the sisters grow closer, even as the narrator’s academic ambitions dissolve in a thickening haze of addiction. At first, everything is giddy and fun --- until suddenly it isn’t. Debbie disappears, leaving the protagonist adrift, unsure if this time with Debbie was the best or worst thing that ever happened to her.

The narrator gets a job as a receptionist in a hospital emergency room, largely to maintain easy access to narcotics. She becomes drawn into other people’s dramas and grows especially fascinated by one young woman, Sasha, who purports to be psychic and claims she’s the narrator’s “amulet”: “You’ve walked off a map the universe intends to keep you on,” she says. “I’m going to help you find your way back.”

What follows is a long road to recovery that leads through a recapitulation of childhood sexual trauma, a reckoning of sorts with Sasha and the narrator’s shared origins in the former Soviet Union (including a trip to Moldova), and, finally, a clear-eyed investigation into what happened to Debbie.

It’s probably safe to say that you’ve never read a novel quite like ALL-NIGHT PHARMACY. It swirls through scenes of drug-fueled ecstasy and despair, sex (both blissful and just plain bad), and moments of empathy and grace. Perhaps because Madievsky is a poet, the prose is so full of electricity that it sometimes seems to spark, with sentences begging to be read aloud. This is a wild, unconventional character study, but it’s also a powerful exploration of what it means to live in relationship to others --- as a sister, a lover or a sympathetic stranger.