New People

Named A 2017 BEST SUMMER READ BY

Vogue • Elle • Esquire • Harper’s Bazaar • Glamour • Buzzfeed • In Style • Men’s Journal • Bustle • Ms. Magazine • Pop Sugar • Newsday • The Millions • Time Out • Bitch • CNN’s The Lead

“[Senna] explore[s] what happens when races and cultures mingle in the home — and under the skin…Her new novel, the sinister and charming New People, riffs on the themes she’s made her own — with a twist. It’s a novel that reads us. It anticipates, and sidesteps, lazy reading and sentimental expectations… The material is hot but the style stays cool… Senna’s aim is precise and devastating…There is no easy consolation in New People. But in its insistence on being read on its own terms, its commitment to complexity, it does something better than describe freedom. It enacts it.” –New York Times

“[A] cutting take on race and class…part dark comedy, part surreal morality tale. Disturbing and delicious.” –People

“An of-the-moment novel [that] tackles identity and infatuation…slender but powerful, as seductive and urgent as a phone call from an old flame. At first blush, the book seems like a straightforward love story…but it’s more complicated than that… This is not a book about race disguised as a romance, nor is it a love story saddled with a moral. Senna’s achievement is that she interlaces both threads in one ingenious tale.” –O, the Oprah Magazine  

“You’ll gulp Senna’s novel in a single sitting—but then mull over it for days.” –Entertainment Weekly

“Slick and highly enjoyable…Thrillingly, blackness is not hallowed in Senna’s work, nor is it impervious to pathologies of ego. Senna particularly enjoys lampooning the search for racial authenticity…Identity, far from being a point of solidarity, is a beckoning void, and adroit comedy quickly liquefies into absurd horror.” –New Yorker

“Danzy Senna delivers her finest and funniest work yet…[she] writes with a dexterous command of character and language. And she unleashes a razor-sharp sense of humor that take aim at and slices through notions of political correctness, identity politics and hypocrisy…achingly funny…and deeply affecting.” –Essence

“A darkly comic novel about race, about false utopias, and about the fine line between seemingly innocuous, everyday groupthink—the kind that’s the price of admission for being part of a marriage, or a band of friends, or a tribe of any sort…. Senna writes beautifully about the complexity of identity, the intersection of racial consciousness, and class awareness, and individual perspective.” –Vogue

“Senna’s thriller-like novel is a stirring exploration of race and identity, and, a propulsive look at a fantasy playing out before one’s eyes.” –Esquire

“Compulsively readable.” –Buzzfeed Books

“It says a great deal for New People — Danzy Senna’s martini-dry, espresso-dark comedy of contemporary manners — that its compound of caustic observations and shrewd characterizations could only have emerged from a writer as finely tuned to her social milieu as [Jane] Austen was to hers… artfully strewn with excruciating and uproarious misperceptions…[New People] doesn’t pour cold water on one’s expectations for a better, more tolerant world. In fact, it implies that world has, to a great extent, already arrived.” –Newsday 

“Set in the Rodney King-era ‘90s, New People is as mesmerizingly fast-paced as it is deeply reflective of monumental truths that resonate perhaps even more powerfully two decades in the future.” –Harper’s Bazaar

“The thorniness of desire is inextricably intertwined here with the fraught history of race in America, and, as in Senna’s previous work, she aims to satirize characterizations of racial identity at every turn… Maria’s deliberate refusal to embrace a more hopeful future keeps eating away at her, leaving her in a potentially ruinous fix by the end of her unresolved story. And yet that refusal — and this novel — is also an antidote to the attempt to dismiss continuing racial inequalities within a narrative of progress. Yes, right now, it’s knotty, and uncomfortable, and depressing. And we must not look away.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“A darkly comic psychological thriller…Senna’s antiheroine is winningly vulnerable… and New People is at its best when it delves into the worlds of Maria’s construction, or reconstruction… [she] wanders the city in a daze, ricocheting from bad decision to bad decision, barely dreaming at all. Her life seems like it will never make room for the answers she seeks, and Senna enjoys every second she takes to make that clear.” –Village Voice

“A provocative conversation starter…with bite and brains… invigorating.” –Paste Magazine

“Sharp.” –Boston Globe

“The frankness with which New People treats race as a kind of public performance is both uncomfortable and strangely cathartic. … Provocative.” –Wall Street Journal

“Agile and ambitious… a wild-hearted romance about secrets and obsessions, a dramedy of manners about educated middle-class blacks – the talented tenth – that is Senna’s authorial home ground.” –Elle

“A paean to the psychosocial complexities of being racially mixed…The novel’s ultimate message seems…to be one both true and unsettling, if unsurprising: that color-lines have never left America and likely never will.”  –Los Angeles Review of Books

“Oooooo, this book! Senna has created an engrossing story of race and class in contemporary America…It’s fantastic! You can practically hear it sizzle in your hands.” –BookRiot 

“A thoughtful, earnest, witty discussion on race.” –Marie Claire

“A brilliant, thoughtful treatise on race and identity in the 21st century.” –Pop Sugar

“[A] taut novel about a couple grappling with guilt, race, and desire in the late ‘90s.” –Esquire

“Compellingly provocative… [Senna] creat[es] a dense psychological portrait of a black woman nearing the close of the 20th century: inquisitive, obsessive, imaginative, alive.”  –New Republic