State of Paradise

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Named a Most Anticipated Book by TIME, Oprah Daily, Esquire, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Marie Claire, ELLE, Bustle, and Lit Hub. An Apple Best Book of July. One of ELLE’s Best Novels of 2024 So Far.

＂A brilliant ghost story and a profoundly moving and atmospheric meditation on place, memory, and the very nature of reality, where everything is truly not as it seems.＂--Mona Awad, author of Rouge

＂At once an adventure and a treat, a deep study of Florida’s psychogeography and a creepy story about ghosts, missing people, cults, and technology. Don’t miss it.＂ --Gabino Iglesias, NPR

A heart-racing fun house of uncanniness hidden in Florida’s underbelly from the celebrated Laura van den Berg

It’s another summer in a small Florida town. After an illness that vanishes as mysteriously as it arrived, everything appears to be getting back to normal: soul-crushing heat, torrential downpours, sinkholes swallowing the earth, ominous cats, a world-bending virtual reality device being handed out by a company called ELECTRA, and an increasing number of posters dotting the streets with the faces of missing citizens. Living in her mother’s home, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author tracks the eerie changes. On top of everything else, she’s contending with family secrets, spotty memories of her troubled youth, a burgeoning cult in the living room, and the alarming expansion of her own belly button.

Then, during a violent rainstorm, her sister goes missing. She returns a few days later, sprawled on their mother’s lawn and speaking of another dimension. Now the ghostwriter must investigate not only what happened to her sister and the other missing people but also the uncanny connections between ELECTRA, the famous author she works for, and reality itself.

A sticky, rain-soaked reckoning with the elusive nature of selfhood and storytelling, Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise is an intricate and page-turning whirlwind. With inimitable control and thrilling style, van den Berg reaches deep into the void and returns with a story far stranger than either reality or fiction.

Laura van den Berg is the author of three story collections, including I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, which was named one the ten best fiction books of 2020 by Time, and the novels Find Me and The Third Hotel, which was a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Award, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and she is a two-time finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Born and raised in Florida, she splits her time between the Boston area and Central Florida.