People Like Us
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- 6,99 €
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- 6,99 €
Publisher Description
People Like Us is Jason Mott's electric new novel. It is not memoir, yet it has deeply personal connections to Jason's life. And while rooted in reality, it explodes with dreamlike experiences that pull a reader in and don't let go, from the ability to time travel to sightings of sea monsters and peacocks, and feelings of love and memory so real they hurt.
In People Like Us, two Black writers are trying to find peace and belonging in a world that is riven with gun violence. One is on a global book tour after a big prize win; the other is set to give a speech at a school that has suffered a shooting. And as their two storylines merge, truths and antics abound in equal measure: characters drink booze out of an award trophy; menaces lurk in the shadows; tiny French cars putter around the countryside; handguns seem to hover in the air; and dreams endure against all odds.
People Like Us is wickedly funny and achingly sad all at once. It is an utter triumph bursting with larger-than-life characters who deliver a very real take on our world. This book contains characters experiencing deep loss and longing; it also is buoyed by riotous humor and characters who share the deepest love. It is the newest creation of a writer whose work amazes, delivering something utterly new yet instantly recognizable as a Jason Mott novel.
Finishing the novel will leave you absolutely breathless and, at the same time, utterly filled with joy for life, changed forever by characters who are people like us.
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.
