Quotients

off the surface, arrives in homecoming a little different. Sometimes the waves ripple out. Other times, they die. It is water where the word travels clear. No-man s-land.
     Sometimes, she said, she wished it were too late for her.
     He dispatched a mobile crisis unit. He aspired to totem comfort. He told her, You are not alone, meaning only any more than anyone else.
     Jeremy s head was heavy with the hour of night, and still to come was his putative real job at the fund, but he would remain on the line until the team arrived for her. And though his voice was reasonable, though his collar was crisp, this was talisman in action, superstitious math: offer safety so what life exacted from him would not be Alexandra.
     He listened to the stranger survive. He said, Stay with me.
 
 
CHAPTER 1
 
Alexandra Chen saw that they looked at her in search. That unplaceable face. All her life people had wanted to fix her features on a map, and they couldn t. It made people clamp down on her with their eyes. They would coast a room in gaze, then halt. They were trying to figure her out.
     She had on a flat gray suit and spoke in her client voice, contained and reassuring. The front of a room did not come naturally to her, but she d practiced how to land her eyes on a small audience and let her voice settle. She had practiced how to sell a country on her selling their country.
     She d done it in Uganda and Sweden, had successes enunciating small former Soviet states still in spinout from the Cold War. Her clients wanted investors from abroad or tourists, to unravage images, firm up legitimacy. Proper trade deals. That s where the

closely-observed suspense.
CrimeReads

A story about secrecy, intimacy, and hidden systems. O Neill s sentences are expertly crafted marvels of economy. Her prose almost feels redacted, as if someone has cut out just the right bits to keep you guessing and thinking and feeling.
Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown

Quotients is a stunning novel. O Neill asks us to take a look at the nature of and the necessity for secrecy in both our most intimate relationships and on the global scale while reminding us of its inevitable demise in an age of eroding privacy. An entrancing, incendiary book the ideas within these pages, and their implications, will haunt you for a good long while.
Lauren Wilkinson, author of American Spy

Quotients is a novel perfectly tuned to our times, and it contains more artistry and intelligence than our times perhaps deserve. Tracy O Neill has constructed the moving story of a young couple trying to build their lives within a divided and constantly dividing world of big data, small faith, political gaming, and unquantifiable fear. A superb and enlivening exploration of paranoia and the search for intimacy.
Jonathan Lee, author of High Dive

"A startling work of art: even as its sentences make precise, jujitsu moves on the reader, Tracy O Neill s Quotients keeps us keyed to intimacy, to love, to a family s moving domestic world. With a plot that s intricate but intimate, global and domestic, this novel pulls us deep into surveillance s dark web, but, grounded in love, it offers us a way out: an awesome artistic feat."
Gina Apostol, author of Insurrecto

Thoroughly engaging and savvy. Part thriller, part mystery, part alarming critique of the world we re all living in without most people knowing it. Also, surprisingly, a love story rendered in galloping prose that takes you all over the map.
Fiona Maazel, author of A Little More Human

"This challenging, slow-burning, yet suspenseful tale is a frame for O Neill s powerful and chilling warning to consider the choices we are making. With an astounding grasp of the issues confronting our age, an assured depiction of a multitude of diverse characters, and a distinctive style all her own, she ranges from movingly sensual descriptions to sharp observations, from wordplay to gut punches. In sum, this is a poignant lament for our time s lost generation, which may be all of us."
Booklist, Starred Review

"Vital and current . . . It is important to remember that in this world of instant connectivity, perhaps we are the engineers of our own loneliness and isolation; perhaps we can listen to O Neill and turn instead toward love."
Brooklyn Rail

"Lingers in the consciousness long after the final page."
Foreword

Praise for The Hopeful
 
National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree
Longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan Debut Novel Prize
An Electric Literature Best Novel the Year
 
Both a beautiful narrative and a political statement worth listening to.
Huffington Post
 
Written with an original literary grace all her own.
The Rumpus
 
The book soars . . . achieving a beauty of its own in the process.
Kirkus Reviews
 
A universal story about aspiration and imperfection . . . [exploring] ideas of heredity, ambition, maturity, failure, and, yes, hope.
Publishers Weekly