New People

She wasn't expecting to see him here tonight. Now, her face feels warm as she watches him step onto the stage and pick up the microphone. He stands like a teenager, slouched and ambivalent, hands shoved in his pockets, as if he's been forced to appear, forced to read his poetry before strangers. Maria first met him several months ago-and now, it seems, he is everywhere she looks. Or maybe she is everywhere he looks. Just last week she ran into him at a restaurant. He was there-sitting at the bar alone, drinking a beer-when she arrived to meet a friend. She stopped to say hello and he said a polite hello back, frowning as if he couldn't remember her name. Afterward, she sat only half listening to her friend rattle on about work, conscious with every breath of his form at the bar.

In the audience, listening to his voice, she realized her that she has been waiting to see him again. She feels uneasy with this awareness. She keeps her eyes fixed on his sneakers, which are dirty and giant. It is too much to look at his face.

Her fiancé, Khalil, sits beside her. Khalil's sister, Lisa, sits on the other side. They flank her. The audience around her, who moments before were laughing and hooting at the last performer, a girl who swung her lorg hair from side to side, seems to have gone unusually still, alert, as if at the precipice of some new awareness.

Khalil places a hand on Maria's knee and leans in and whispers, This guy's pretty good. She nods, glancing away from the stage toward the back of the club. It is raining outside. Maria thinks she should tell Khalil she feels sick and wants to go home-because in a way, this is true. But she doesn't. She stays seated, her face turned away toward the exit and when it's all over, she follows Khalil and Lisa to the front of the club; they both want to say hello. She hangs back, listening to them speak. Lisa is saying something about a line she likes from his penultimate poem. That's the word she uses. Penultimate. Khalil

Danzy Senna's first novel, the bestselling Caucasia, won the Stephen Crane Award for Best New Fiction and the American Library Association's Alex Award, was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. A recipient of the Whiting Writers Award, Senna is also the author of the novel Symptomatic, the memoir Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, and the story collection You Are Free. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the novelist Percival Everett, and their sons.

Named a Best Summer Read by Vogue, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, BuzzFeed, Glamour, Bustle, Chicago Review of Books and Newsday

"Everyone should read it." --Vogue

"The third novel by an author who's been weaving indelible portraits of race and class in America for nearly two decades could not have arrived at a more apt time...The stakes of Senna's latest triumph are both personal and global and will provide a powerful and necessary echo of our current cultural climate." --Harper's Bazaar

"You'll gulp Senna's novel in a single sitting-but then mull over it for days." --Entertainment Weekly

"A striking, off-kilter exploration of race and class." -Huffington Post

"Danzy Senna's latest stunner of a novel is both political and bingeable, worthy of a one-sitting read" --Vulture

"Shrewd and funny." --Newsday

"An absolutely brilliant darkly comic wild ride of a novel-it's completely fearless and subversive while at the same time incredibly honest and accurate in how it approaches race and class." --Porochista Khakpour, LitHub

"A darkly comic page-turner." -Los Angeles Daily News

"Blazing, unstoppable... a fast, darkly funny read." --BookPage

"A great read, both compelling and thoughtful. The narrative has a page-turning urgency, as Maria tumbles toward a disaster of her own making." --Library Journal (starred)

"Senna's fearless novel is equal parts beguiling and disturbing... [she] combines the clued-in status details you'd find in a New York magazine article with the narrative invention of big-league fiction.... Every detail and subplot...is resonant. A great book about race and a great book all around." --Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"Remarkable. New People plays out like Greek tragedy and social comedy all at once, reminding you that the worst kind of hell is always the one we raise." --Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings

"New People sparkles with precision, and with antic and merciless hilarity. I was seduced into