We Came Here to Forget
"Katie Cleary has always known exactly what she wants: to be the best skier in the world. As a teenager, she leaves her home to live and train full time with her two best friends, all-American brothers Luke and Blair, whose wealthy father has hired the best coaches money can buy. Together, they are the USA's best shot at bringing home Olympic gold. But as the upward trajectory of Katie's elite skiing career nears its zenith, a terrifying truth about her sister becomes impossible to ignore--one that will lay ruin not only to Katie's career but to her family and her relationship with Luke and Blair. With her life shattered and nothing left to lose, Katie flees the snowy mountainsides of home for Buenos Aires. There, she reinvents herself as Liz Sullivan, and meets a colorful group of ex-pats and the alluring, charismatic Gianluca Fortunado, a tango teacher with secrets of his own. This beautiful city, with its dark history and wild promise, seems like the perfect refuge, but can she really outrun her demons? In alternating chapters, Katie grows up, falls in love, and races down the highest peaks on the planet--while Liz is reborn, falls into lust, and sinks into the underground tango
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about We Came Here to Forget
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Two days after her older sister Penny is arrested in Park City, Utah, US ski team star Katie Cleary boards a plane for Buenos Aires under a different name.
It is fiction, but Andrea Dunlop drew on her experience having a sister with Munchausen by proxy. Her later memoir The Mother Next Door covers the real history more directly.
Most of the novel takes place among expats in Buenos Aires, with flashbacks to a Pacific Northwest skiing community.
We Came Here to Forget was written by Andrea Dunlop, published in 2019 by Atria Books.
We Came Here to Forget is 320 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, We Came Here to Forget takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
We Came Here to Forget is a standalone novel by Andrea Dunlop, not part of a series.
We Came Here to Forget is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.