Kate Weinberg

"Beautiful." —Sarah Jessica Parker"Funny and painfully true. . . . The best thing you'll read this year." —Kiley Reid, author of Such a Fun Age A raw, tenderly comic, and perfectly off-kilter novel about a woman with a mysterious illness who occasionally finds herself in "The Pit” — a delirious state of semi-consciousness — and the improbable, sometimes-imagined people who meet her there.Vita Woods is on the brink. She produces a popular podcast and lives with her successful doctor boyfriend, Max, with whom the sex is great and the future promising. Her brilliant if unreliable sister Gracie is her best friend and sparring partner. And her steadfast goldfish, Whitney Houston, brightens even her dimmest days. Because the days are dark, as much as things are going right. Vita is not leaving the house. In fact, she can barely make it out of bed.Instead, she spends long, blurred hours falling in and out of “The Pit,” dead to the world and to herself. For months, Vita has been sick with an illness that no doctor, not even Max, can diagnose. And recently, Luigi, a Renaissance poet nursing a 500-year-old heartbreak, has started showing up at her bedside, bringing snacks and unsolicited romantic advice. He says he’s come to release her. The issue he may be a ghost, an apparition of her sickly mind.Then, when, an unexpected mix-up pushes her into the path of her upstairs neighbors, Vita finds friendship — and perhaps more — in the apartment above. But something about her “condition” keeps nagging at her. What if the problem is Vita herself? Because as far as anyone can prove...there’s nothing wrong with her.

‘Where do I find Crime?’ ‘Crime doesn’t have its own section,’ said the librarian without looking up, ‘it’s all under fiction.’ In this seductive coming-of-age debut, Jess Walker, a young and uninitiated first year student, falls in love with two great story-tellers. One, Alec, a journalist in exile, the other, Lorna, a charismatic literature professor. Starting out under the flat grey skies of an east Anglian university campus and ending up on an idyllic Mediterranean island, The Truants is about a group of clever and eccentric misfits who yearn to break the rules. As Jess’ experience of infatuation and betrayal, disappearance and loss gives way to a breathless search for the truth, she finds herself detective in a twisted crime of the heart. Unsettling, challenging, surprisingly funny and beautifully written, The Truants is a compulsively readable literary debut with a twist – and a dead body to boot.