I stumbled across this in a catalogue, and the synopsis caught my attention. Alexandra Kleeman‘s second novel — following the debut novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine and the short story collection Intimations — looks really interesting. Something New Under the Sun is a near-future story that takes a look at the darker side of Hollywood. Really looking forward to reading this. Here’s the full synopsis:
A novelist discovers the dark side of Hollywood and reckons with ambition, corruption, and connectedness in the age of environmental collapse and ecological awakening…
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. Partnering with Cassidy — after having been her reluctant chauffeur for weeks — 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 poised and all-too-timely story, Alexandra Kleeman grapples with the corruption of our environment in the age of alternative facts. She does so with a meticulous and deeply felt accounting of our very human anxieties, liabilities, dependencies, and, ultimately, our responsibility to truth.
Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun is due to be published by Hogarth in North America (August 3rd) and Fourth Estate in the UK (June 10th).
Civilian Reader 