Something New Under the Sun

Description

'Magnificent and stunning' Jeff VanderMeer 'An immense achievement. Masterful and merciless' Olivia Sudjic 'Expertly conjures California noir filtered through the ambient and not-so-ambient apocalypse' Emma Cline Patrick Hamlin has come from New York to Hollywood to see his novel be adapted for the screen, but why does he get the strange feeling that the film isn't even being made, that it's just a smokescreen for something else? Troubled starlet Cassidy Carter is due to play the female lead in the film, but why doesn't she seem to care what happens on set? Does she know something he doesn't? Or can she help him get to the truth? His wife Alison has taken their daughter Nora to a commune in upstate New York to mourn the destruction of nature, but is she safe there or is the Earthbridge community a cult exploiting her anxieties? When fires rage through the Californian landscape, how is it that a certain type of tiny pale blue flower remains sweetly blue, not singed by the flames? And what is the truth about WAT-R, the synthetic water everyone drinks out in LA? Is it really as harmless as everyone says? Ablaze with vivid, unforgettable images and smouldering with elegiac menace, Something New Under the Sun is an unmissable novel for our present moment - a bold exploration of capitalism, corruption and environmental catastrophe, and as entertaining, alluring and beautiful as it is devastating. 'An urgent novel about our very near future and a deeply addictive pleasure . . . Kleeman is a phenomenon, one of the most brilliant and gifted writers at work today' Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies A WHITE REVIEW BOOK OF THE YEAR * A LIT HUB BEST BOOK OF 2021

Alexandra Kleeman is a Staten Island-based writer of fiction and nonfiction, and the winner of the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Conjunctions, and Guernica, among others. Nonfiction essays and reportage have appeared in Harper's, Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian. Her work has received scholarships and grants from Bread Loaf, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Santa Fe Art Institute, and ArtFarm Nebraska. She is the author of the debut novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine (Harper, 2015) and Intimations (Harper, 2016), a short story collection.

'Alexandra Kleeman expertly conjures California noir filtered through the ambient and not-so-ambient apocalypse' Emma Cline, author of The Girls 'Written with tremendous verve and flair, Something New Under the Sun is both an urgent novel about our very near future and a deeply addictive pleasure. Constantly surprising and endlessly inventive, every page is saturated with wit, intelligence, and extraordinary prose. Kleeman is a phenomenon, one of the most brilliant and gifted writers at work today' Katie Kitamura, author of A Separation 'With this novel, Alexandra Kleeman confirms her place as one of the major writers of her generation. Reading it is like looking at a familiar room through warped glass: What you perceive is distorted and unsettling while remaining curiously beautiful' Esme Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias 'A richly rendered ecological novel, characterized not only by how it sets the landscape but also by the fact that the landscape is quite often allowed to run the show. Kleeman is phenomenal when it comes to place writing. Like many of the characters in her book, I got lost inside her scene-setting, arid and wild, happy to let her drive me wherever her genius brain thought we should go. This is a book I'll be thinking about for years to come' Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth 'An immense achievement. A masterful and merciless skewering of our times, rendered with such grace I couldn't put it down' Olivia Sudjic, author of Asylum Road '...Kleeman is a writer working with far more flair than most. Her novels critique the comfortable indifference of life under late capitalism and, as such, are quite the opposite: observant, unnerving and bold' i Newspaper 'Profoundly affecting -somehow both funny and deeply unsettling' Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind