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 ... Read moreand blazingly smart debut
GARTH GREENWELL A commanding debut by a writer of intense precision and restraint. Like a Kelly Reichardt film or an Adrianne Lenker album, Newbound's novel conjures a spare, hushed world from which much has been elided, yet what remains is finely crafted and deeply felt
NEW YORK TIMES
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 I love a messy sapphic book. If you’re a fan of Sad Girl Literature, this should be top of your TBR
BOOKRIOT
Newbound refuses her protagonist any obvious routes to happiness. What she offers Elsa, at last, has far greater worth: a reminder that what we ought to find in relationships, any kind of relationship, is something like mutual understanding, like recognition
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
The protagonist of Newbound’s witty debut novel returns to her hometown nursing a catatonic sorrow after her brutal breakup with a couple who were her employers before they were also her lovers and roommates
NEW YORK TIMES, Six new books we recommend this week
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