From “a major, unnervingly intelligent writer” (Joy Williams) … “rich, funny, learned, and tonally fresh” (Jeffrey Eugenides), comes a novel about aspiration, film, work, and love.
Dana Spiotta’s new novel is about two women, best friends, who grow up in LA in the 80s and become filmmakers. Meadow and Carrie have everything in common—except their views on sex, power, movie-making, and morality. Their lives collide with Jelly, a loner whose most intimate experience is on the phone. Jelly is older, erotic, and mysterious. She cold calls powerful men and seduces them not through sex but through listening. She invites them to reveal themselves, and they do.
Spiotta is “a wonderfully gifted writer with an uncanny feel for the absurdities and sadnesses of contemporary life, and an unerring ear for how people talk and try to cope today” (New York Times). Innocents and Others is her greatest novel—wise, artful, and beautiful.
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“Two girls meet and become friends in the 1980s, drawn together by their shared love of film. Narrator January LaVoy’s low-key style perfectly fits this somber story…The book’s dark, deep insights into filmmaking are a slow reveal, masterfully played out in LaVoy’s rich, quiet voice and deliberate pacing. Her presentation is reminiscent of someone reluctantly revealing a painful secret.”
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