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
‘Fresh and bold. I was mesmerised’ Julia May Jonas
‘A brave and blazingly smart debut’ Garth Greenwell

Elsa is struggling. The relationship that has consumed her twenties is over and now she’s working as a hostess in the small town where she grew up. Her one outlet is the internet: and she’s soon racking up hours of screentime in her childhood bedroom, falling down rabbit holes that promise a brighter, tidier, better future.

There’s one particular object of her obsession: an up-and-coming actor who starts to occupy her every thought. When the actor arrives in Elsa’s hometown, she finds her virtual and actual realities colliding. But as Elsa vies to infiltrate the young man’s circle, she finds a new and very real connection forming with one of his queer friends, forcing her to rethink her own identity and desires.

‘Casts a spell in coolly detached prose, plunging us into the membrane between the social and the parasocial. I was blown away’ Antoine Wilson
‘Enthralling, astonishingly assured … At once familiar and estranging’ Sarah Blakley-Cartwright

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