The Shimmering State

Meredith Westgate

Hardcover

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Included in
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Named a Book You Need to Read in 2021 by Harper's Bazaar

A "moving, astounding, and totally unsettling" (Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author) literary debut following two patients in recovery after an experimental memory drug warps their lives.

Lucien moves to Los Angeles to be with his grandmother as she undergoes an experimental treatment for Alzheimer's using the new drug, Memoroxin. An emerging photographer, he's also running from the sudden death of his mother, a well-known artist whose legacy haunts him.

Sophie has just landed the lead in the upcoming performance of La Sylphide with the Los Angeles Ballet Company. She still waitresses at the Chateau Marmont during her off hours, witnessing the recreational use of Memoroxin--or Mem--among the Hollywood elite.

When Lucien and Sophie meet at The Center, founded by an ambitious yet conflicted doctor to treat patients who've abused Mem, they have no memory of how they got there--or why they feel so inexplicably drawn to each other. Is it attraction, or something they cannot remember from "before"?

"Contemplative and wonderfully evocative, finishing The Shimmering State is like waking from a dream, where you reenter the world with fresh eyes and wonder at the frailty of your own memories" (Jessica Chiarella, author of The Lost Girls).

Book Details

Publisher: Atria Books
Publish Date: Aug 10th, 2021
Pages: 320
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 9.23in - 6.37in - 1.16in - 1.07lb
EAN: 9781982156718
Categories: • Literary• Coming of Age• Dystopian

About the Author

Westgate, Meredith: - Meredith Westgate grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. The Shimmering State is her first novel. Visit her at MeredithWestgate.com and on Instagram @MeredithWestgate.

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

"Like an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for the #MeToo era, The Shimmering State is a riveting, nuanced, and ultimately haunting meditation on the triangular relationship between sense, memory, and identity. There must be something in the California air because, like Joan Didion, Meredith Westgate has an extraordinary ear, not only for the stories we tell ourselves in order to live, but for the ways that we endlessly revise them to suit the new selves we continue to construct." --ADAM WILSON, author of Sensation Machines

"Cinematic, dreamlike, at times brutal yet poignant. The premise of this new memory drug is tantalizing, and the storylines that unfold from the abuse of it are compelling." --FRANCES CHA, author of If I Had Your Face

"Westgate's novel does what the absolute best books do--it makes you experience the world so differently. Who are we? Are we our memories? And if so, how do we know what memories are true and what might be manipulated? Moving, astounding, and totally unsettling. But also, as fascinating as memory itself." --CAROLINE LEAVITT, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You and With or Without You

"Contemplative and wonderfully evocative. Finishing The Shimmering State is like waking from a dream, where you re-enter the world with fresh eyes and wonder at the frailty of your own memories." --JESSICA CHIARELLA, author of And Again and The Lost Girls

"Who are we without our memories? Who might we be if we could relive someone else's? Meredith Westgate's captivating first novel wrestles with these existential questions without sacrificing her characters' distinctive and emotional essences. An impressive, unsettling, and surprisingly romantic debut." --HELEN SCHULMAN, author of Come With Me

"The Shimmering State is a slick, LA-set gel-cap, easily digestible, where memories and trauma are wiped away, though their imprints remain. At a rejuvenation center, a photographer and a dancer let their old selves go--every last unwanted memory--while out in the world, strangers' memories are available for consumption in pill form. A classic tale of artists trying to make it in LA flipped on its head." --KATIE M. FLYNN, author of The Companions

"A dreamy and dazzling first novel. . . . As the story deepens the timelines - past and present - grow closer, and Westgate skillfully tightens the tension so that readers turn pages quickly, needing to know what will happen next. . . . [I]ts setting is fully realized Westgate conjures a vivid Los Angeles full of aspiring dreamers and those who would take advantage of them. . . . The Shimmering State spins a compelling story about what a person will do in order to relieve pain - and what is lost in that release." --USA Today

"The Shimmering State gives readers what its title promises: a shimmering, dreamlike experience of multiple lives that collide and repel through fate and coincidence. In this hypnotic novel, Westgate offers her characters, and her readers, a beautifully dystopian shot at redemption, and shows the lengths people will go to remember and to forget." --LYDIA KIESLING, author of The Golden State

"Stirring, lush, and thought-provoking, The Shimmering State is an entrancing novel about the losses that bind us and the memories that define us." --ELAN MASTAI, author of All Our Wrongs Today