Description

A smart, savage and hilarious debut exploring love, sexuality, purpose – and the delicious absurdities of online life

‘For fans of Patricia Lockwood and Alexandra Tanner … A tale of internet longing and obsession that leads to self-discovery’ OurCulture

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Elsa is struggling. Her formative, exhilarating relationship – with an older couple – has abruptly ended, leaving her depressed and directionless in her childhood bedroom. In the relationship’s wake, Elsa scrolls aimlessly through the internet in search of meaning.

Faithfully, her screen provides a new obsession: a charismatic young actor whose latest feature is a gay love story that illuminates Elsa’s crisis. And then, as if she had conjured him, the actor arrives in her hometown, with an entourage of fellow actors, writers, and directors, for the annual theatre festival. When she is hired at the one upscale restaurant in town, Elsa finds herself thrown into in contact with the actor and his circle.

But her obsession shifts from the actor to his frequent dinner companion – an alluring, androgynous person called Sam. As this confusing connection develops, Elsa is forced to grapple with her sexuality, the uncomfortable truths about the end of her last relationship, and the patterns that may be playing out once again.

Unflinchingly sharp and funny, Misrecognition is an unforgettable debut novel about the internet, post-postmodern adulthood and queer identity.

‘Quick, playful, self-deprecating … Newbound’s real skill is in dialogue’ Times Literary Supplement

Readers love Misrecognition
‘Pure messy queerness and I absolutely adored it’
‘My ideal kind of beach read’
‘Imagine a mix of Emma Cline, Marlowe Granados, and Sally Rooney… Highly recommend’

Publisher Review

Numbed by heartbreak, lost in a peculiarly American loneness, the protagonist of Madison Newbound’s haunting novel brings new understandings of identity and sex to old experiences of melancholy and obsession. I’ve never read anything that captures so vividly the distinct texture of desire, at once feverish and vacant, engendered by the infinite scroll of online life. Misrecognition is a brave and blazingly smart debut — GARTH GREENWELL Sleek and sexy, assured yet searching, Misrecognition so perfectly captures the highs and lows of intimacy in the digital age, the loneliness of always being connected but also the soul-rearranging elation of finding someone who shows you to yourself — MICHELLE HART, author of We Do What We Do In the Dark An astonishingly assured debut. Every interaction is like a mirage, at once familiar and estranging, and in Newbound’s enthralling novel we are all, every one of us, actors — SARAH BLAKLY-CARTWRIGHT, author of Alice, Sadie, Celine Misrecognition casts a spell in coolly detached prose, brilliantly plunging us into the porous membrane between the social and the parasocial. I was blown away by this singular and mesmerizing debut — ANTOINE WILSON, author of Mouth to Mouth