Staff Pick
No one is just one thing. Take K, for instance: she spends her days getting just high enough and managing the men who pay her for sex. Time passes in a blur of heroin, hedonism, and risky sushi from Duane Reade, but underneath that routine is something else. It's this something else that's with K all the time, throughout the manicures, and the art films, and the stain on the ceiling above her bed, and the memories of what came before. Who is K really? Ultraluminous is raw, hideous, and beautiful, an open wound of a book. Recommended By Lauren P., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Girlfriend. Prostitute. Addict. Terrorist? Who is K?
Ultraluminous, the daring new novel from Katherine Faw, the brilliant author of Young God, follows one year in the life of a high-end, girlfriend-experience prostitute. She has just returned to her native New York City after more than a decade abroad in the capitals of Asia and the Middle East, her last stop Dubai, with a man she recalls only as the Sheikh but it s unclear why exactly she s come back. Did things go badly for her? Does she have scores to settle?
Regardless, she has quickly made herself at home. She s set up a rotation of clients all of them in finance, and each of whom has different delusions of how he is important to her. And she s also met a man whom she doesn t charge a damaged former Army Ranger, back from Afghanistan, and a fellow long-time heroin addict.
Her days are strangely orderly: a repetition of dinners, personal grooming, museum exhibitions, sex, Duane Reades (she likes the sushi), cosmology, sex, gallery shows, heroin, sex, and art films (which she finds soothing). The pattern is comforting, but does she really believe it s sustainable? Or do the barely discernible rifts in her routine suggest that something else is percolating under the surface? Could she have fallen for one of her bankers? Or do those supposed rifts suggest a pattern within the pattern, a larger scheme she s not showing us, a truth that won t be revealed until we can see everything?
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Synopsis
One of The New Yorker's "Books We Loved in 2017," a BOMB's Looking Back on 2017: Literature Selection, and one of Vulture's 10 Best Thriller Books of 2017.
Girlfriend. Prostitute. Addict. Terrorist? Who is K?
The daring new novel from Katherine Faw, the brilliant author of Young God, is a scintillating story of money, sex, and power told in Faw's viciously sharp prose. A high-end, girlfriend-experience prostitute has just returned to her native New York City after more than a decade abroad--in Dubai, with a man she recalls only as the Sheikh--but it's unclear why exactly she's come back. Did things go bad for her? Does she have scores to settle?
Regardless, she has quickly made herself at home. She's set up a rotation of clients--all of them in finance--each of whom has different delusions of how he is important to her. And she's also met a man whom she doesn't charge--a damaged former Army Ranger, back from Afghanistan.
Her days are strangely orderly: A repetition of dinners, personal grooming, museum exhibitions, sex, Duane Reades (she likes the sushi), cosmology, sex, gallery shows, nightclubs, heroin, sex, and art films (which she finds soothing). She finds the pattern confirming, but does she really believe it's sustainable? Or do the barely discernible rifts in her routine suggest that something else is percolating under the surface? Could she have fallen for one of her bankers? Or do those supposed rifts suggest a pattern within the pattern, a larger scheme she's not showing us, a truth that won't be revealed until we can see everything?