I'm fascinated by stories about complicated friendships because they speak to our eternal need to be part of something. Everyone wants to have friends, especially when we’re young, but what if those friendships aren’t good for us? What happens when self-interest motivates our social choices? It seems there’s often a fragile boundary between love and hate. This volatile intensity becomes addictive. I'm a Canadian writer with a BA in English from the University of Ottawa. When writing fiction, I love exploring the toxic threads of jealousy, ambition, and obsession that both bind us together and tear us apart.
This worth-the-hype, urgent debut set in the late 1960s was a formative read for me.
We get the perspective of a young teenager, Evie, who hovers like a moth around Suzanne's entrancing light. Suzanne herself belongs to a strange sisterhood of devoted followers in a Manson-Family-esque cult. Evie lets her identity and morals blur as she does anything she can to impress Suzanne.
When we’re caught at the right–or, I guess, wrong–time, obsession and codependency can feel like having a purpose. She wants to be Suzanne and be with her. I was transfixed by Evie’s melancholic outsider perspective.
A gripping and dark fictionalised account of life inside the Manson family from one of the most exciting young voices in fiction.
If you're lost, they'll find you...
Evie Boyd is fourteen and desperate to be noticed.
It's the summer of 1969 and restless, empty days stretch ahead of her. Until she sees them. The girls. Hair long and uncombed, jewelry catching the sun. And at their centre, Suzanne, black-haired and beautiful.
If not for Suzanne, she might not have gone. But, intoxicated by her and the life she promises, Evie follows the girls back to the decaying ranch where…
This is a gorgeously written book about two best friends doing nothing in particular. Isa and Gala arrive in New York City intertwined and allied.
They whirl through all the requisite stops of the party girl layabout lifestyle. I was fascinated by the friendship’s closeness; Isa and Gala know each other’s quirks and fears in staggering intimacy. They function as a unit, as a “we.” Isa’s aimlessly wandering through life, but she isn’t in it alone, and that’s comforting to me.
Together, Isa and Gala turn aimlessness into freedom. It’s a detail-packed, slow-burning portrait of how we build identity together, intertwining ourselves and pushing each other forward.
With the verve and bite of Ottessa Moshfegh and the barbed charm of Nancy Mitford, Marlowe Granados's stunning debut brilliantly captures a summer of striving in New York City
Refreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicating novel of youth well spent. Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old, and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. She arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blond Gala Novak. They have little money, but that's hardly going to stop them…
I’m a sucker for an “unlikeable” narrator and was especially struck by the hazy, angry one we get in this book.
She’s sleeping away a year of her life with the help of an endless list of questionable pharmaceuticals. Her friendship with Reva, her former college roommate, feels out of obligation at best and self-punishment at worst. Reva visits her, and even though we know she hates hearing Reva’s woes, she keeps listening.
She cares for Reva, under it all, but can't stand her. Reva doesn’t seem to like her much, either. I was struck by the fearless, uncomfortable portrayal of how our own inner worlds can pull us back from being part of others' lives. We still cling to these shaky connections for stability.
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Amazon,Vice, Bustle, The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, The AV Club, & Audible
A New York Times Bestseller
"One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanaxed b*tcheries somehow wend their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound." - Entertainment Weekly
"Darkly hilarious . . . [Moshfegh's] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood." -Vogue
I adored Charlotte and Rose’s heartbreaking friendship.
First, Charlotte and Rose come of age in the late nineties, a perfect pair with an inseparable bond taking on New York City. As they grow up, it’s their individual problems and decisions that loosen the bolts holding them together. Some friendships shape us into who we are, so losing a friend brings grief and anger.
Charlotte and Rose are both rich, fully realized characters with goals that don’t always align. Bauer’s brilliant prose makes this a book I could read again and again.
'The instant feminist classic our generation has been waiting for' Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can't Sleep
What happens when growing up means growing apart?
1997. New York.
Earnest, bookish Rose.
Brash, extrovert Charlotte.
When they moved to New York in the late nineties, coffee cost less than a dollar and you could still smoke in bars. You could stay up drinking all night, sat in vinyl booths patched up with duct tape.
Everyone has their own New York, and for Rose and Charlotte it was a place to feed their ambition, a place to dance and party and…
This satire of academia's petty politics is horrifying and hilarious.
The Bunnies are a clique of wealthy MFA students whose uncomfortably close friendship disgusts and intrigues lonely Samantha. When Samantha’s invited to join the group for a night, she tosses her only other friend aside. She hates the Bunnies, but you know what they say: if you can’t beat them, join them. Samantha’s inner conflict fascinated me.
We struggle with her to understand what’s compelling her to fall for the group's strange allure. This friend group is toxic to its core, but this book showed me that it's surprisingly easy to drink poison if it tastes good enough.
"Jon Swift + Witches of Eastwick + Kelly 'Get In Trouble' Link + Mean Girls + Creative Writing Degree Hell! No punches pulled, no hilarities dodged, no meme unmangled! O Bunny you are sooo genius!" —Margaret Atwood, via Twitter
"A wild, audacious and ultimately unforgettable novel." —Michael Schaub, Los Angeles Times
"Awad is a stone-cold genius." —Ann Bauer, The Washington Post
The Vegetarian meets Heathers in this darkly funny, seductively strange novel from the acclaimed author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl.
After her mother’s death, Faun, a naïve college dropout, grabs her Polaroid and hops a Greyhound to Los Angeles. She reconnects with her charismatic childhood friend Josie, now an up-and-coming model and muse who’s now dating Cal Holiday, the frontman of the superstar rock band Holiday Sun. Faun is mesmerized by the band and the groupies who support them in myriad ways.
Faun obsessively photographs this dazzling new world, struggling to balance her artistic ambitions with the band’s expectations. As her confidence grows, she becomes reckless with friendship, romance, her ethics, and her bank account. Soon, Faun realizes just how blind she has been to the darkest corners of this glamorous musical dreamland as the summer heats up and everything spirals out of control.
A fast-paced literary thriller with a strong sci-fi element and loaded with existential questions. Beyond the entertainment value, this book takes a hard look at the perilous world of publishing, which is on a crash course to meet the nascent, no-holds-barred world of AI. Could these worlds co-exist, or will they destroy each other? And more importantly, how will humans tolerate their own creations, the robots, on this planet?
In this, his latest speculative fiction novel, Shane Joseph, returns to the “what if” questions facing humanity that he raised in After the Flood, a book that won him the…
With Chatbots and Large Language Models changing the world of writing and publishing dramatically, what happens when we introduce a sentient robot capable of feelings into the mix?
Phil Kruger, inventor, and serial womanizer, believes he has the answer in his creation, Victoria, the first sentient robot in the world, imbued with beauty, knowledge, and strength and on a crash course to acquire human feelings through massive infusions of data. Arrayed against him are independent trade publisher Artemius (Art) Jones and his rebellious and sexually starved daughter, Paula, an editor herself, who is determined to take her father's failing press,…
