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A Novel
by Regina Porter
A diverse group of New Yorkers are brought together by the search for a missing woman—in this electric novel of secrets, connection, and community.
Brooklyn, 2020. Theo Harper and his pregnant wife, Darla, head upstate to their summer cottage to wait out the lockdown. Not everyone in their upscale Park Slope building has this privilege: not Xavier, the teenager in the Cardi B T-shirt, nor Darla's best friend, Ruby, and her partner, Katsumi, who stay behind to save their Michelin-starred restaurant.
During an upstate hike on the aptly named Devil's Path, Theo divulges a long-held secret—and when Darla disappears after the ensuing argument, he finds himself the prime suspect. As Darla's and Theo's families and friends come together to search for her, with Ruby and Katsumi stepping in to broker peace, past and present collide with startling consequences.
Set against the pulse of an ever-changing city, The Rich People Have Gone Away connects the lives of ordinary New Yorkers to tell a powerful story of hope, love, and inequity in our times—while reminding us that no one leaves the past behind completely.
"This restless, intentionally unsettling novel establishes Porter as a distinctive, confident literary voice." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Porter keenly explores themes of generational and racial privilege and a community's fragile bonds. This one makes the lockdown worth revisiting." —Publishers Weekly
"Regina Porter weaves beauty and humor with pathos, in prose that is winding, prescient, and profound. She shows us worlds inside of worlds—of queerness, of love and relationships, of who we are and who we're told to be—crafting a narrative that is both precise and thunderous. The Rich People Have Gone Away moves and transcends. We're so lucky to have it." —Bryan Washington, author of Family Meal
"A masterpiece of human portraiture that simultaneously renders quintessential depictions of the city, of America, and of the whole world in these first fraught decades of the twenty-first century." —Paul Harding, author of This Other Eden
"Riveting... The Rich People Have Gone Away mines the delicate and treacherous terrain in which human relationships and social divisions are rooted." —Charmaine Wilkerson, author of Black Cake
This information about The Rich People Have Gone Away was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Regina Porter is an award-winning playwright and author of The Travelers, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and longlisted for the Orwell Prize for political fiction. A graduate of the MFA fiction program at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, her writing has been published in the Harvard Review, Tin House, and the Oxford American.
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