Private Citizens

From a brilliant new literary talent comes a sweeping comic portrait of privilege, ambition, and friendship in millennial San Francisco. With the social acuity of Adelle Waldman and the murderous wit of Martin Amis, Tony Tulathimutte’s is a brainy, irreverent debut— for a new era.

Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the aughts,  embraces the contradictions of our new century: call it a loving satire. A gleefully rude comedy of mannersfor 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 humor and pain, the four estranged friends stagger through the Bay Area’s maze of tech startups, 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, is as expansively intelligent as it is full of heart.