Flashout
A Novel
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- 12,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
"Exhilarating."—The New York Times
Named a Best Book of 2025 by CrimeReads
A thrill-seeking young woman joins a radical theater troupe in this taut, suspenseful novel of art, seduction, and the deadly limits of liberation.
New York, 1972. A cloistered college student slips out of the dorms to attend a performance by a legendary experimental performance troupe. Within months, she has left campus life behind and joined the company, infatuated by its charismatic leader and his promises of absolute freedom.
California, 1997. A theater teacher at an exclusive private school receives an unsettling letter. With her job at risk and her past clawing at her carefully constructed present, what will she do to protect the life she has made?
Riveting and atmospheric, Flashout is a coruscating coming-of-age story and an immersive thriller exploring the enchantments and perils of art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York Times culture reporter Soloski (Here in the Dark) delivers a heady, atmospheric thriller that underscores the dark side of art-making. Allison Morales arrives in New York City in 1972 "so hungry for experience that some days I could taste it like blood in the back of my throat." She falls in with Theater Negative, a cultlike group of avant-garde performers living in squalor and clinging to their '60s heyday. She's utterly seduced, both by the group's intoxicating notions of personal freedom and by their leader, Peter, who cycles through the young women who drift into Theater Negative's orbit. After Allison is expelled from school, she joins the group on a hastily assembled European tour that quickly turns disastrous when an attempt at a pornographic film shoot leads to sexual assault and murder. Soloski braids together the '70s timeline with one set 25 years later, when Allison is teaching theater in L.A. and reckoning with her days in Theater Negative. Eventually, she decides to seek out the group's surviving members. The tone is pitch-black throughout, with the older Allison frankly assessing the harm she's inflicted in response to the harm she suffered, but Soloski's darkly seductive prose wrings harsh beauty from the characters' pain. The results are grimly satisfying.
