Private Citizens

Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the noughties, Private Citizens embraces the contradictions of our new century. Call it a gleefully rude comedy of manners, a Middlemarch for Millennials.

The novel's four whip-smart narrators – idealistic Cory, Internet-lurking Will, awkward Henrik, and vicious Linda – are torn between fixing the world and cannibalizing it. In boisterous prose that ricochets between humour and pain, the four estranged friends stagger through the Bay Area's maze of tech start-ups, protestors, gentrifiers, karaoke bars, house parties and cultish self-help seminars, washing up in each other's lives once again. A wise and searching depiction of a generation grappling with privilege and finding grace in failure, Private Citizens is as expansively intelligent as it is full of heart.