Something New Under the Sun: A Novel

Product Description

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A novelist discovers the dark side of Hollywood and reckons with ambition, corruption, and connectedness in the age of environmental collapse and ecological awakening—a darkly unsettling near-future novel for readers of Don DeLillo and Ottessa MoshfeghONE OF SUMMER’S BEST BOOKS: The Wall Street Journal • Time • Vulture • Parade • LitHub • Vanity Fair • Vogue • Refinery29 • Esquire“A darkly satirical reflection of ecological reality.”—Time“Genius.”—Los Angeles Times“Wildly entertaining and beautifully written.”—LitHub
East Coast novelist Patrick Hamlin has come to Hollywood with simple goals in mind: overseeing the production of a film adaptation of one of his books, preventing starlet Cassidy Carter’s disruptive behavior from derailing said production, and turning this last-ditch effort at career resuscitation into the sort of success that will dazzle his wife and daughter back home. But California is not as he imagined: Drought, wildfire, and corporate corruption are omnipresent, and the company behind a mysterious new brand of synthetic water seems to be at the root of it all. Patrick partners with Cassidy—after having been her reluctant chauffeur for weeks—and the two of them investigate the sun-scorched city’s darker crevices, where they discover that catastrophe resembles order until the last possible second.

In this often-witty and all-too-timely story, Alexandra Kleeman grapples with the corruption of our environment in the age of alternative facts.
Something New Under the Sun is a meticulous and deeply felt accounting of our very human anxieties, liabilities, dependencies, and, ultimately, responsibility to truth.

Review

“Throughout, Kleeman writes expressively about place and the manifold ways our lives are shaped by our imperiled environment, foregrounding the slow-motion catastrophe of climate change and its attendant anxieties.”
—Vulture

“Because this is an Alexandra Kleeman novel, none of it goes where you think it’s going to, but it’s all so wildly entertaining and beautifully written that it really doesn’t matter where you end up.”
—Literary Hub

“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
 
“Alexandra Kleeman expertly conjures California noir filtered through the ambient and not-so-ambient apocalypse.”
—Emma Cline

“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.”
—Esmé Weijun Wang
 
“
Something New Under the Sun is 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. Kleeman is at her very best here. This is a book I’ll be thinking about for years to come.”
—Kristen Arnett

“A magnificent and stunning novel, by turns hilarious, satirical, moving, and so very, very much what we need in these uncertain times.”
–Jeff VanderMeer

“Kleeman’s ranging and ambitious latest . . . imagines a climate-ravaged near-future California. . . . The action is propulsive and entertaining even as the horrors of climate change smolder around every corner. Readers will be captivated by this intelligent, rip-roaring story.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Beginning with a hipster vibe that wickedly satirizes the frippery of Holly