New People

“[A] cutting take on race and class...part dark comedy, part surreal morality tale. Disturbing and delicious." —People

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, Vogue, TIME, NPR, and The Root

As the twentieth century draws to a close, Maria is at the start of a life she never thought possible. She and Khalil, her college sweetheart, are planning their wedding. They are the perfect couple, "King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom." Their skin is the same shade of beige. They live together in a black bohemian enclave in Brooklyn, where Khalil is riding the wave of the first dot-com boom and Maria is plugging away at her dissertation, on the Jonestown massacre. They've even landed a starring role in a documentary about "new people" like them, who are blurring the old boundaries as a brave new era dawns.

Everything Maria knows she should want lies before her—yet she can't stop daydreaming about another man, a poet she barely knows. As fantasy escalates to fixation, it dredges up secrets from the past and threatens to unravel not only Maria's perfect new life but her very persona.

PRAISE FOR NEW PEOPLE

“[Senna’s] new novel, the sinister and charming New People, riffs on the themes she’s made her own — with a twist. It’s a novel that reads us. It anticipates, and sidesteps, lazy reading and sentimental expectations… The material is hot but the style stays cool… Senna’s aim is precise and devastating…There is no easy consolation in New People. But in its insistence on being read on its own terms, its commitment to complexity, it does something better than describe freedom. It enacts it.” – Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

“An of-the-moment novel [that] tackles identity and infatuation…slender but powerful, as seductive and urgent as a phone call from an old flame. At first blush, the book seems like a straightforward love story…but it’s more complicated than that… This is not a book about race disguised as a romance, nor is it a love story saddled with a moral. Senna’s achievement is that she interlaces both threads in one ingenious tale.” —O, The Oprah Magazine 

“You’ll gulp Senna’s novel in a single sitting—but then mull over it for days.” –Entertainment Weekly

“Slick and highly enjoyable…Thrillingly, blackness is not hallowed in Senna’s work, nor is it impervious to pathologies of ego. Senna particularly enjoys lampooning the search for racial authenticity…Identity, far from being a point of solidarity, is a beckoning void, and adroit comedy quickly liquefies into absurd horror.” –The New Yorker

“Danzy Senna delivers her finest and funniest work yet…[she] writes with a dexterous command of character and language. And she unleashes a razor-sharp sense of humor that take aim at and slices through notions of political correctness, identity politics and hypocrisy…achingly funny…and deeply affecting.” –Essence

“A darkly comic novel about race, about false utopias, and about the fine line between seemingly innocuous, everyday groupthink—the kind that’s the price of admission for being part of a marriage, or a band of friends, or a tribe of any sort…. Senna writes beautifully about the complexity of identity, the intersection of racial consciousness, and class awareness, and individual perspective. . . Everyone should read it.” —Vogue

“Senna’s thriller-like novel is a stirring exploration of race and identity, and, a propulsive look at a fantasy playing out before one’s eyes.” –Esquire
 
“It says a great deal for New People — Danzy Senna’s martini-dry, espresso-dark comedy of contemporary manners — that its compound of caustic observations and shrewd characterizations could only have emerged from a writer as finely tuned to her social milieu as [Jane] Austen was to hers… artfully strewn with excruciating and uproarious misperceptions…[New People] doesn’t pour cold water on one’s expectations for a better, more tolerant world. In fact, it implies that world has, to a great extent, already arrived.” –Newsday

“Set in the Rodney King-era ‘90s, New People is as mesmerizingly fast-paced as it is deeply reflective of monumental truths that resonate perhaps even more powerfully two decades in the future.” –Harper’s Bazaar 

“Sharp.” –The Boston Globe

“The frankness with which New People treats race as a kind of public performance is both uncomfortable and strangely cathartic. … Provocative.” –The Wall Street Journal

“Agile and ambitious… a wild-hearted romance about secrets and obsessions, a dramedy of manners about educated middle-class blacks – the talented tenth – that is Senna’s authorial home ground.” –Elle

“A paean to the psychosocial complexities of being racially mixed…The novel’s ultimate message seems…to be one both true and unsettling, if unsurprising: that color-lines have never left America and likely never will.”  –Los Angeles Review of Books

“Oooooo, this book! Senna has created an engrossing story of race and class in contemporary America…It’s fantastic! You can practically hear it sizzle in your hands.” –BookRiot

“A brilliant, thoughtful treatise on race and identity in the 21st century.” –Pop Sugar

“Compellingly provocative… [Senna] creat[es] a dense psychological portrait of a black woman nearing the close of the 20th century: inquisitive, obsessive, imaginative, alive.” –The New Republic

“Senna’s meditation on 1996 America and its false sense of progress is an eerie picture of society today, too. With a dark sense of humor, Senna builds her story with a horror-like tension that releases with a tongue-in-cheek sigh. Sure to keep readers riding white-knuckled to the end.” –Booklist

“Danzy Senna’s latest stunner of a novel is both political and bingeable, worthy of a one-sitting read”  –Vulture

“Provocative…Expertly plotted and full of dark humor, New People is a thoughtful and unforgettable look at race and class at the dawn of the 21st century.” –BookPage

“A striking, off-kilter exploration of race and class.” –Huffington Post

“An achievement in so many ways. It succeeds, to begin with, in capturing the psyche of a woman worn down by expectation. It also convincingly distills the essence of an “intentional community” in bohemian black Brooklyn. And it manages to send up the literary tropes of biracial representation, in particular that of the “tragic mulatto,” a mixed-race person who’s traumatized by their inability to fit neatly into distinct racial categories and their attendant social schema. Senna plugs that legendary trope into the classic humor machine. …With New People, Senna appears to have written the book she was waiting for.” –The Baffler

“One of the very most interesting social writers the 21st century has yet to produce…Senna explodes American conceptions of class and race in ways that will make readers completely uncomfortable.” —Seattle Weekly

“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 ★

“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★

“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 reading it in one sitting, but will be thinking about it for a long time to come. This book—utterly grave, and yet beautifully light-hearted–is a wonder. 
–Rachel Kushner, author of Creation Lake

“I stayed up way later than planned to finish New People, Danzy Senna’s riveting, take-no-prisoners, dystopic dream of a novel. More scorcher than satire, New People loads identity, race, despair, and desire into a blender then hits high. Get ready to stay up late, to be propelled, pricked, and haunted.” 
–Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

“Danzy Senna detonates the bomb between respectability and desire. In hypnotizing prose, New People kicks you in the gut, then sings you a lullaby. Read this and be haunted. Senna is a master.”
–Mat Johnson, author of Loving Day