New People

(Paperback)

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From the bestselling author of Caucasia, a subversive and engrossing novel of race, class and manners in contemporary America. Named a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, VOGUE,TIME MAGAZINE, NPR and THE ROOT Named A 2017 BEST SUMMER READ BY Vogue. Elle .Harper's Bazaar. Glamour. Buzzfeed . In Style . Men's Journal.Bustle.Ms. Magazine.Pop Sugar.Newsday. The Millions. Time Out. Bitch.CNN's The Lead. The Fader " A cutting take on race and class...part dark comedy, part surreal morality tale. Disturbing and delicious." -People "You'll gulp Senna's novel in a single sitting-but then mull over it for days."-Entertainment Weekly "Everyone should read it."-Vogue From the bestselling author of Caucasia, a subversive and engrossing novel of race, class and manners in contemporary America. As the twentieth century draws to a close, Maria is at the start of a life she never thought possible. She and Khalil, her college sweetheart, are planning their wedding. They are the perfect couple, "King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom." Their skin is the same shade of beige. They live together in a black bohemian enclave in Brooklyn, where Khalil is riding the wave of the first dot-com boom and Maria is plugging away at her dissertation, on the Jonestown massacre. They've even landed a starring role in a documentary about "new people" like them, who are blurring the old boundaries as a brave new era dawns. Everything Maria knows she should want lies before her--yet she can't stop daydreaming about another man, a poet she barely knows. As fantasy escalates to fixation, it dredges up secrets from the past and threatens to unravel not only Maria's perfect new life but her very persona. Heartbreaking and darkly comic, New People is a bold and unfettered page-turner that challenges our every assumption about how we define one another, and ourselves.

Reviews

Named A 2017 BEST SUMMER READ BY

Vogue Elle EsquireHarper's BazaarGlamour Buzzfeed In Style Men's JournalBustleMs. MagazinePop SugarNewsday The MillionsTime Out BitchCNN's The Lead

"[Senna] explore[s] what happens when races and cultures mingle in the home and under the skin...Her new novel, the sinister and charming New People, riffs on the themes shes made her own with a twist. Its a novel that reads us. It anticipates, and sidesteps, lazy reading and sentimental expectations The material is hot but the style stays cool Sennas aim is precise and devastatingThere is no easy consolation in New People. But in its insistence on being read on its own terms, its commitment to complexity, it does something better than describe freedom. It enacts it.New York Times

"[A] cutting take on race and classpart dark comedy, part surreal morality tale. Disturbing and delicious.People

An of-the-moment novel [that] tackles identity and infatuationslender but powerful, as seductive and urgent as a phone call from an old flame. At first blush, the book seems like a straightforward love storybut its more complicated than that This is not a book about race disguised as a romance, nor is it a love story saddled with a moral. Sennas achievement is that she interlaces both threads in one ingenious tale. O, the Oprah Magazine

"Youll gulp Sennas novel in a single sittingbut then mull over it for days.Entertainment Weekly

Slick and highly enjoyableThrillingly, blackness is not hallowed in Sennas work, nor is it impervious to pathologies of ego. Senna particularly enjoys lampooning the search for racial authenticity...Identity, far from being a point of solidarity, is a beckoning void, and adroit comedy quickly liquefies into absurd horror. New Yorker

Danzy Senna delivers her finest and funniest work yet[she] writes with a dexterous command of character and language. And she unleashes a razor-sharp sense of humor that take aim at and slices through notions of political correctness, identity politics and hypocrisyachingly funny...and deeply affecting."Essence

A darkly comic novel about race, about false utopias, and about the fine line between seemingly innocuous, everyday groupthinkthe kind thats the price of admission for being part of a marriage, or a band of friends, or a tribe of any sort.... Senna writes beautifully about the complexity of identity, the intersection of racial consciousness, and class awareness, and individual perspective. Vogue

Sennas thriller-like novel is a stirring exploration of race and identity, and, a propulsive look at a fantasy playing out before ones eyes.Esquire

Compulsively readable.Buzzfeed Books

It says a great deal for New People Danzy Sennas martini-dry, espresso-dark comedy of contemporary manners that its compound of caustic observations and shrewd characterizations could only have emerged from a writer as finely tuned to her social milieu as [Jane] Austen was to hers artfully strewn with excruciating and uproarious misperceptions[New People] doesnt pour cold water on ones expectations for a better, more tolerant world. In fact, it implies that world has, to a great extent, already arrived. Newsday

Set in the Rodney King-era 90s, New People is as mesmerizingly fast-paced as it is deeply reflective of monumental truths that resonate perhaps even more powerfully two decades in the future. Harpers Bazaar

The thorniness of desire is inextricably intertwined here with the fraught history of race in America, and, as in Sennas previous work, she aims to satirize characterizations of racial identity at every turn Marias deliberate refusal to embrace a more hopeful future keeps eating away at her, leaving her in a potentially ruinous fix by the end of her unresolved story. And yet that refusal and this novel is also an antidote to the attempt to dismiss continuing racial inequalities within a narrative of progress. Yes, right now, its knotty, and uncomfortable, and depressing. And we must not look away.San Francisco Chronicle

A darkly comic psychological thrillerSennas antiheroine is winningly vulnerable... andNew Peopleis at its best when it delves into the worlds of Marias construction, or reconstruction [she] wanders the city in a daze, ricocheting from bad decision to bad decision, barely dreaming at all. Her life seems like it will never make room for the answers she seeks, and Senna enjoys every second she takes to make that clear. Village Voice

A provocative conversation starter...with bite and brains invigorating.Paste Magazine

Sharp. Boston Globe

"The frankness with which New People treats race as a kind of public performance is both uncomfortable and strangely cathartic. ... Provocative."Wall Street Journal

Agile and ambitious...a wild-hearted romance about secrets and obsessions, a dramedy of manners about educated middle-class blacks the talented tenth that is Sennas authorial home ground. Elle

A paean to the psychosocial complexities of being racially mixedThe novels ultimate message seems...to be one both true and unsettling, if unsurprising: that color-lines have never left America and likely never will.Los Angeles Review of Books

Oooooo, this book! Senna has created an engrossing story of race and class in contemporary AmericaIts fantastic! You can practically hear it sizzle in your hands. BookRiot

A thoughtful, earnest, witty discussion on race.Marie Claire

A brilliant, thoughtful treatise on race and identity in the 21st century.Pop Sugar

[A] taut novel about a couple grappling with guilt, race, and desire in the late 90s.Esquire

Compellingly provocative [Senna] creat[es] a dense psychological portrait of a black woman nearing the close of the 20th century: inquisitive, obsessive, imaginative, alive."New Republic

Sennas meditation on 1996 America and its false sense of progress is an eerie picture of society today, too. With a dark sense of humor, Senna builds her story with a horror-like tension that releases with a tongue-in-cheek sigh. Sure to keep readers riding white-knuckled to the end. Booklist

Danzy Sennas latest stunner of a novel is both political and bingeable, worthy of a one-sitting readVulture

ProvocativeExpertly plotted and full of dark humor,New Peopleis a thoughtful and unforgettable look at race and class at the dawn of the 21st century. BookPage

Danzy Sennas latest novel is the best of her writing. Its rich, nuanced, and in some respects, scary. The question at its core is: What happens when your perfect life isnt enoughBitch

A striking, off-kilter exploration of race and class.Huffington Post

[New People] will catch readers off guard with its plot twists and almost too-relatable characters. Senna uses light humor to balance disturbing events that present Maria with more than a few reality checks.Ms. Magazine

New People will challenge your assumptions about how you define yourself and others.
HelloGiggles

An achievement in so many ways. It succeeds, to begin with, in capturing the psyche of a woman worn down by expectation. It also convincingly distills the essence of an intentional community in bohemian black Brooklyn. And it manages to send up the literary tropes of biracial representation, in particular that of the tragic mulatto, a mixed-race person whos traumatized by their inability to fit neatly into distinct racial categories and their attendant social schema. Senna plugs that legendary trope into the classic humor machine. With New People, Senna appears to have written the book she was waiting for.The Baffler

An absolutely brilliant darkly comic wild ride of a novelits completely fearless and subversive while at the same time incredibly honest and accurate in how it approaches race and class. --Porochista Khakpour, LitHub

A darkly comic page-turner.Los Angeles Daily News

A lively, biting novel about the heavy burdens of racial self-consciousness and the perils of an identity forged by the assumptions of others.1843 Magazine

"Sennas latest novel, New People, occupies the uneasy space between horror and humor.
Vineyard Gazette

One of the very most interesting social writers the 21st century has yet to produce...Senna explode

Author Bio

Danzy Senna's first novel, the bestselling Caucasia, won the Stephen Crane Award for Best New Fiction and the American Library Association's Alex Award, was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. A recipient of the Whiting Writers Award, Senna is also the author of the novel Symptomatic, the memoir Where Did You Sleep Last Night, and the story collection You Are Free. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the novelist Percival Everett, and their sons.