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‘A stunning novel’ SAMANTHA HARVEY
‘Impressive’ OBSERVER
‘Stylish, sharp, genuinely funny’ CLAIRE POWELL

When Dylan begins an affair with Gabe, nothing will be the same again.

On the surface Dylan has achieved the impossible – a life in New York. And yet it is not the thing she’d imagined. When she walks out of her career, then apartment, and into a housesit for an artist she’s never met, she does not tell her friends, her family, or her boyfriend Matt.

But how much can a person change? At a party she meets her new neighbour Gabe, who is married to Kate, and the affair that follows consumes her. She resolves to explore what is fixed and what is variable, until an unexpected encounter between the two couples forces Dylan to confront her future.

‘Unsettling and original’ TESSA HADLEY
‘So sharp and well observed’ REBECCA WAIT

***A MARIE CLAIRE BEST BOOK OF 2024***

Publisher Review

A stunning novel. Remarkable and real. Every single line is supercharged with a kind of cerebral eroticism, a zinging inventive intelligence. The sentences buzz and hum — Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital Sharp and entertaining * Daily Mail * Impressive… A book founded on the anxiety that undermines our drive towards attachment and stability, and it thrives on a constant sense of slippage and precarity, a jumpy exploration of what it might feel like to cede control, and what might take its place * Observer * Pountney has an admirable clarity of voice and her book is consistently impressive… Intelligent, confident and original * Times Literary Supplement * How to Be Somebody Else has literary oomph… What sets this debut apart is the way it sustains its sparky style to the last page without stinting on the serious stuff * Sunday Times * Brutal and brilliant, in luscious prose, How to Be Somebody Else shows us what happens when life starts to unfurl — Annie Lord, author of Notes on Heartbreak Unsettling and original — Tessa Hadley, author of After the Funeral So sharp and well observed. I loved the wry, understated humour, and how perceptive the book is about female desire. In its exploration of a woman trying to make sense of herself it is moving without being sentimental, and clever without seeming to try too hard — Rebecca Wait, author of I’m Sorry You Feel That Way Compulsive. It makes its moves with such assurance that it’s hard to believe this is Pountney’s first novel. A wild mess of sex and feeling is here given beautiful form — Adam Thirlwell, author of The Future Future A novel of graceful sentences and perfectly-lit vignettes, often obliquely funny; the minutiae and questionable decisions of a newly reimagined life, observed at just the right distance for us to see the whole and the details at once — Holly Gramazio, author of The Husbands