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A Novel
by Hallie Elizabeth Newton
A day-in-the-life debut novel about a fading socialite on the hunt for someone to kill her before her next Soul Cycle class.
New York City, 2014. Agnes Maurer is seeking the appropriate killer. Candidates include: an icy magazine editor with a special cutlery set; a Craigslist gun dealer; and Agnes' toxic novelist boyfriend. In her hunt, she stumbles into unexpected detours: cleansing crystals, must-have handbags, a Tesla ride where someone else dies, naked housekeeping, and an encounter with deep, dark water.
Through a murderously attuned kaleidoscope stained with image, money, and sex, Agnes' dwindling hours of icon-filled privilege become a breathless search for self. Agnes Lives! is a killer exhibition, an obsessive rendering of millennial sexuality as internalized abuse and consummate style, with the knob righty-tightened all the way. Newton's prose is disturbingly fun, relentless, shattering. A crafted study of mid-aughts values that have brought us to where we are now. The ping-pong pacing crashes into a worthy, intense denouement.
"[A] whirlwind, wholly original debut novel...Told strictly in Agnes' voice (even the dialogue is one-sided), this is a deep dive into a millennial mind in free fall. It's dark but also funny, disturbing yet identifiable, and while it goes off the rails toward the end, it's a trip worth taking." —Booklist
This information about Agnes Lives! was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Hallie Elizabeth Newton was born in Mississippi. She received her first screenplay credit for At Any Price, released by Sony Picture Classics. In 2016, she received the Goldwater Fellowship to earn her Master's in Creative Writing from NYU. Her short story "Man Made" won first prize for fiction in Columbia Journal's 2020 Winter Contest. Her work is forthcoming from American Chordata. She lives between New York and the Deep South.
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