People Like Us
A Novel
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Time—Atlanta Journal-Constitution—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)—Library Journal—Kirkus
Longlisted for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Finalist for the Willie Morris Awards for Southern Fiction
Finalist for the BookTube Prize for Fiction
One of TIME Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025
One of USA Today’s 15 Books You Should Read This Summer
One of Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Hot New Summer Reads
One of People's Most Anticipated Summer Books
One of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025
A Late Show Book Club pick
The riveting novel by the author of the National Book Award winner and bestseller Hell of a Book
In People Like Us, two Black writers are trying to find peace and belonging in a world riven with violence. One is on a global book tour after winning a big prize; the other is set to speak at a school that has suffered a tragedy. And as the authors’ storylines merge, truths and antics abound in equal measure: from tiny French cars and melancholy winter hotel rooms, from humble family land to the wealthiest estates, this book asks us to witness people and their dreams enduring against all odds.
You will meet larger-than-life characters who deliver very real takes on our world. They experience deep loss and longing; they are also buoyed by riotous humor and share the deepest love. It is the latest creation of a writer whose work will leave you breathless, filled with joy for life, and changed forever by characters who are people like us.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Author Jason Mott follows his head-spinning Hell of a Book with another genre-defying triumph. People Like Us gleefully blurs the line between memoir and fiction, reality and dreamscape, humour and heartbreak. (In fact, it’s a sequel of sorts to Mott’s National Book Award–winning novel, but it also works beautifully as a standalone.) People Like Us follows two Black authors—one abroad on a book tour, the other in the Midwest preparing to speak at a school affected by gun violence—as their narratives intertwine, overlap, and ultimately challenge the way stories are told. It’s a novel of emotional depth and lacerating wit. Characters drink from literary trophies, memories and sea monsters both surface without warning, and irreverent humour sits comfortably alongside gut-punching grief. The result is a dazzling, disorienting, and deeply moving exploration of race, identity, and what it means to feel at home in a country that can’t always hold you safely.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The scathing latest from Mott (Hell of a Book) follows two Black writers from North Carolina as they grapple with the violence of American society and the mixed blessings of success. Soot, whose story is told in the third person, is invited to speak at a college in Minnesota that was recently the site of a mass shooting ("It's all going to be okay, now that you're here," says the school representative who picks him up from the airport). In his writing and public appearances, he's known to "speak to grief," having lost his daughter Mia to suicide when she was 16. Mott alternates the story of Soot's college visit with that of a writer who bears similarities to Mott (his name is revealed near the end) and who buys a Colt .45 (a gun he chooses because it's "as American as apple pie") to protect himself after receiving death threats. When he's offered a Faustian bargain from a French billionaire—patronage for life, on the condition that he never return to the U.S.—he bitterly accepts and moves to Paris ("For the right price, leaving America just might be the new American Dream," he reflects). There, the novel's mischievous humor gradually gives way to a frightening fever dream. Mott's satire is thoroughly uncompromising, which makes it all the more refreshing.
