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A Novel
by Jason Mott
Book Reviewed by:The riveting new novel by the author of the 2021 National Book Award winner and bestseller Hell of a Book.
People Like Us is Jason Mott's electric new novel. It is not memoir, yet it has deeply personal connections to Jason's life. And while rooted in reality, it explodes with dreamlike experiences that pull a reader in and don't let go, from the ability to time travel to sightings of sea monsters and peacocks, and feelings of love and memory so real they hurt.
In People Like Us, two Black writers are trying to find peace and belonging in a world that is riven with gun violence. One is on a global book tour after a big prize win; the other is set to give a speech at a school that has suffered a shooting. And as their two storylines merge, truths and antics abound in equal measure: characters drink booze out of an award trophy; menaces lurk in the shadows; tiny French cars putter around the countryside; handguns seem to hover in the air; and dreams endure against all odds.
People Like Us is wickedly funny and achingly sad all at once. It is an utter triumph bursting with larger-than-life characters who deliver a very real take on our world. This book contains characters experiencing deep loss and longing; it also is buoyed by riotous humor and characters who share the deepest love. It is the newest creation of a writer whose work amazes, delivering something utterly new yet instantly recognizable as a Jason Mott novel.
Finishing the novel will leave you absolutely breathless and, at the same time, utterly filled with joy for life, changed forever by characters who are people like us.
Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award 2026
Here is an interesting award recognizing distinguished fiction that tells American stories in a uniquely American voice, one that reflects Mark Twain's incisive curiosity and humanity. Celebrating its tenth year. Longlist 2026 Are You Happy?: Stories — Lori Ostlund Atavists: Stories — Lydia Mille...
-Anne_Glasgow
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (11/20/2025)
Just finished People Like Us by Jason Mott. Some of it felt like a replay of Hell of a Book (a book I really loved), but the ending chapters pulled it out of the doldrums for me. On audio, I'm...
-Robin_G
People Like Us follows two storylines, both centering Black American writers. A third-person narration focuses on Soot, also featured in Mott's previous National Book Award-winning Hell of a Book, as he lives in grief over his teenage daughter's suicide and travels to a speaking engagement in Minnesota at a school where students and parents have been left grasping for meaning after a shooting. In alternating chapters, a first-person narrator and winner of the NBA undertakes a life-altering journey to Europe after receiving a death threat from a mysterious man named Remus and being taken under the wing of a French billionaire...People Like Us is the special kind of book that leaves an imprint on the mind, that thrives on subtext even as it also says a lot directly. It is honest about America, gun violence, and racism, but isn't any kind of impassioned plea for the reader to look closer at these things. Instead, it evokes the ethereal melancholic ache of waking from a dream where things were somehow different, somehow better, that moment when you simultaneously understand the dream was never real while feeling it still within your grasp—eminently relatable, bittersweet bargaining—and then suggests this may not be a wasted sentiment, that beyond the outer limits of acceptance, there may be yet another shore to reach...continued
Full Review
(949 words)
(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
Jason Mott won the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction with Hell of a Book, a novel that shares some characters and qualities with People Like Us. In People Like Us, one character narrates his own experience winning what is alternately called the National Book Award, "the n-word," and "The Big One." Mott is playful and exaggerated (let's hope) in his implications of just how revered and coveted the NBA is. In one scene, the author-narrator's agent Sharon says, referring to the bronze sculpture given as the prize, out of which partying publishing people have been doing shots of "Cross-Genre" ("moonshine, champagne, and a dash of strawberry syrup"), "where is he? … He's part mine, you know," before she "darts off into the party and ...
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