Imagine The Bonfire of the Vanities compressed into a week of pandemic teaching, or Renata Adler casting her gimlet eye on the absurdities of motherhood. This is the best comic novel I've read in years.--Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams

It's the good life. Or is it? Gillian Linden's eminently engaging heroine--loving mother, wife, and teacher in an elite private school--valiantly aims to do the right thing as she navigates the complexities of ironic absurdities and quiet tragedies reflective of our time. Written with a cool eye and a warm heart, this remarkable novel is both wryly comic and profoundly thought-provoking. It's a stunning achievement worthy of all the praise it will undoubtedly receive.--Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of Rabbits for Food

Imagine Franz Kafka as a substitute English teacher at a Manhattan school where the tuition exceeds the average American salary and William Shakespeare teeters on the brink of cancellation. With an unerring eye for the arresting detail, Negative Space charts the brisk undercurrents of horror and hilarity beneath the pristine surfaces of life in the metropolitan elite. Gillian Linden's brilliant debut novel captures the anxiety that pervades even the most affluent and aromatic of American spaces.--Sophie Pinkham, author of Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine

A subtle and promising debut about the hazy liminality of late pandemic life.-- "Kirkus Reviews"

Penetrating...An evocative study of the gap between intuition and truth.-- "Publishers Weekly"

The prose throughout is lapidary, sharp...Negative Space beautifully executes a good amount of what feels imperative; acutely, assuredly, it mirrors a particular world back to us.--Lynn Steger Strong "New York Times Book Review"

Beguiling, vexing, and exhilarating....The feeling is that of the fiction of the New Journalists...like the murmurous specificity of Joan Didion. It also brought to mind the classic of closely observed domestic life in Brooklyn, Paula Fox's Desperate Characters.--Thomas Beller "Air Mail"

Subtly written...[I]ts style most resembles the so-called Minimalist writing of Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie.--Sam Sacks "Wall Street Journal"

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Pub date: 2024-04-16

Length: 176 pages