'George Saunders meets Ottessa Moshfegh' OBSERVER
'Smart, jarring and wickedly funny' GUARDIAN
'The excavation of heterosexual desire our age deserves' LITHUB
'Imagine Vladimir Nabokov as a manic pixie dream girl, and you’ll be halfway there' GQ
'Top of our reading pile' SUNDAY TIMES STYLE
'Bitterly funny' VOGUE
A hilarious, surreal, and devastating journey into the mind of Reality Kahn, a young woman on a quest to be the greatest girlfriend of all time.
It was decreed from the moment she was bornth. Twenty-three-year-old Reality Kahn would embark on a quest so great, so bold. She would become the greatest girlfriend of all time. She would be a zine maker, an aspiring notary, the greatest waterslide commercial actress on the Eastern Seaboard. She would receive messages from the beyond in the form of advice from the esteemed and ancient ladies’ magazine, Girlfriend Weekly.
When she attends a party at a punk venue known as ‘Paradise’, Reality meets Ariel, her fated boyfriend. Determined to win his affection, she joins a cutting-edge clinical trial created by Dr Zweig Altmann to help her become a perfect girlfriend. She stars in a new commercial. She learns how to become an indelible host. But Reality will also learn that sheer will and determination, and a very open heart, are not always enough to make true love manifest.
At turns laugh-out-loud funny, tragic and jarring, Reality’s quest grows ever more complicated as the men in her life: Ariel, her agent Jethro, and Dr Altmann himself, prove treacherous.
PARADISE LOGIC is a thrilling breakdown of our obsession with authentic true love, and announces Sophie Kemp as a brilliant and wholly original new voice in fiction.
'Some of the weirdest and funniest prose imaginable' MEGAN NOLAN
'The funniest book of the year and one of the smartest' GARY SHTEYNGART
Advance reader reviews for PARADISE LOGIC:
‘I had so much fun reading Kemp’s debut... absolutely nuts, in the best way'
‘What a weird book, I loved it... incredibly readable and worryingly relatable'