Dead in Long Beach, California

CHARLOTTE'S PICK

It can be difficult to connect with your protagonist when they spend much of their novel in a grief-fueled fugue-state, but if you can step away from the chaos of acclaimed sci-fi author Coral's tangible reality and join her within her even more perilous and conflicted unconsciousness, the disassociation quickly falls away and a fully-formed narrative of hyperconnectivity emerges. Is a social media presence as good as, or even better than, life itself? Get ready to reevaluate your digital footprint, the latest and most lasting of our mortal detritus. -CC

A gut-busting and heartbreaking descent into one woman's fraying connection to reality, from a soon-to-be superstar.

Coral is the first person to discover her brother Jay’s dead body in the wake of his suicide. There’s no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother.

Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire, becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reckless determination, she doubles —and triples—down on posing as her brother, risking not only her own sanity but her relationship with her precocious niece, Khadijah. As Coral’s swirl of lies slowly closes in on her, the quirky and mysterious alien world of Wildfire becomes enmeshed in her own reality, in the process pushing long-buried memories, traumas, and secrets dangerously into the present.

A form-shifting and soul-crunching chronicle of grief and crisis, Venita Blackburn’s debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is a fleet-footed marvel of self-discovery and storytelling that explores the depths of humankind’s capacity for harm and healing. With the daring, often hilarious imagination that made her an acclaimed short-fiction innovator, Blackburn crafts a layered, page-turning reckoning with what it means to be alive, dead, and somewhere in between.

Hardcover |240 pages | 5.70" x 8.55"