. With its sun-drenched setting and a blend of humor and unease, this novel is a must-read that expertly captures the essence of California noir in a world on the brink of change.

I really enjoyed reading this book. It was very interesting. Looking into the dark and weird insight into Hollywood. It’s very well written

Intense, Vivid..
Intensely thought provoking, dark and vivid tale of the darker side of Hollywood and what lies behind, set against the searing climate of a Californian landscape. An exploration of corruption, greed and the ultimate price to pay - via a plot populated with credible and a remarkably well drawn cast of characters and a vividly painted backdrop,

It took me a while to get into this book but I am glad that I did - it's one of the most scenic and bizarre books I have read this year! An important message told in a style that reminds me of Palahniuk meets Philip K Dick but with a load of 2020 in there. Very dark from a skilled author.

I liked the concept and hybridity of genre of the novel but unfortunately I don't think it delivered as well. However, still an enjoyable dystopian novel!

I try to find the positive in every book as I'm conscious of the blood, sweat and tears most writers put into their works. However I'm sad to say I struggled to stay engaged with this dystopian novel. I had high hopes for this one but the book dragged for me, I didn't connect to the characters, the book was full of over the top descriptions of everything (e.g. 3 pages on the effects of dehydration) to rambling, never-ending dialogues that didn't go anywhere. I struggled to stay engaged and finish this one. Thank you NetGalley and 4th Estate for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review

Troubled starlet Cassidy Carter is due to play the female lead in the film, but why doesn’t she seem to care what happens on set? Does she know something he doesn’t? Or can she help him get to the truth?

His wife Alison has taken their daughter Nora to a commune in upstate New York to mourn the destruction of nature, but is she safe there or is the Earthbridge community a cult exploiting her anxieties?

When fires rage through the Californian landscape, how is it that a certain type of tiny pale blue flower remains sweetly blue, not singed by the flames?
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I’m so, so sorry to say I had to DNF this at 50% when I found myself skimming entire pages. I’ve been trying to finish it since 1st August and I read quickly, so to still be trying to get into it 3 months later means this just wasn’t for me. This is the first NetGalley book I couldn’t bring myself to power through so I could review it. In real life if I DNF a book, I’ll come back to it at a later stage but I got to the point where I was dreading picking this up.
The blurb and concept were so interesting, but the chapters were too long and the writing kept going off on too many tangents to hold genuine interest.
Absolutely gutted.

Something New Under The Sun's mood is 'late stage capitalism meets slow burning climate apocalypse', and it has that Philip K. Dick feel of being clearly set in the future, but a future we could arrive at in a matter of months. At first glance, Patrick and Cassidy should be unrelatable to ordinary people, but their anxieties and dreams drew me in, and I found myself rooting for them to successfully navigate this slowly unravelling society and it's total acceptance of WAT-R. While I enjoyed this novel immensely, I felt the middle was a bit baggy, and the ending perhaps too whimsical, but that's probably just me.

It's Philip K. Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly meets Shane Black's movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

The two main characters, the novelist Patrick Hamlin and starlet Cassidy Carter, are some of the most unforgettable characters I've read in years. They have that unlikely-pair dynamic that we all feel comfort in, and it's so much fun falling down the spiral of an eco-mystery with them as our guide. But the biggest surprises won't be found in how the plot unravels or the whodunnit (which this book has in two or three subplots). The biggest reveal is in the prose--the sentences and language will make you chuckle, delight, and despair. The characters' emotions and desires are deeply connected to the Earth (even the ambivalent ones), as is the emotional core of this novel.

This genre-defying book was hailed by the New York Times as a “screwball comedy in a sci-fi hellscape, a freighted parable”. I was sufficiently intrigued to give it a go.

Part speculative fiction, part climate crisis fiction, part Hollywood satire, part detective caper, it is a creepy, unsettling read that I didn’t quite know what to make of. My impression: Mulholland Drive meets The Big Lebowski meets Scooby Doo.

The story goes as follows. Patrick, a writer, is in LA, ostensibly to work on a movie based on his book, starring Cassidy, an out of favour former child actress. Patrick however ends up running errands for the producers, which lead him to suspect that all is not as it seems with the movie.

While this is going on, LA is burning. Californian wildfires are a permanent feature of life and all running water has evaporated. People have switched to drinking and using a manufactured water alternative called WAT-R. There is also a strange sudden onset acute dementia spreading among the population. So what exactly is going on? Patrick and Cassidy end up teaming up to investigate.

Meanwhile on the East Coast, Patrick’s wife and daughter have decamped from NYC to an eco commune, hoping to live a more sustainable life. The book switches between the two locations (but more focus is on the LA story).

I didn’t like any of the characters and I found the vibe of the book quite flat overall (I think ambient was the intention), but the story itself is intriguing in its strangeness. The book explores conspiracy theories and feels other worldly at times, but is sufficiently grounded in our world that you feel distinctly uneasy as a reader about how us humans treat this precious planet of ours.

It’s safe to say this will not be a book for everyone, but there’s definitely a cohort of people out there who’ll read this review and think - that sounds right up my street. For me, 3.5/5 ⭐️

Alexandra Kleeman’s new novel is a hybrid of speculative climate fiction and an exploration of consumerism, capitalism and our obsession with celebrity.

Patrick, a forty-something novelist from the East Coast arrives in LA where his debut novel is being made into a film starring Cassidy, a former child actress now better known for her off-screen behaviour. The producers are somewhat cagey about the project and Patrick soon loses all illusions about making it big in Hollywood, his role reduced to being an errand boy and Cassidy’s driver. Meanwhile, his wife, obsessed with our impact on the environment, decamps to a new-agey environmental commune with their daughter.

Some time prior to Patrick’s arrival, extended spells of draught have led to the whole of Southern California switching to chemically produced, manufactured water supply and wildfires are constant. As weeks pass, Patrick becomes more and more suspicious of the producers’ motives and convinced all is not well in Southern California as his grip on reality loosens.

I thought the novel started off brilliantly: witty and sharp character observations, the vapidness of Hollywood, fabulous passages about landscape. I thought critics describing Kleeman as a great observer were spot on. However, as the novel progresses, it seemed to be more about commentary and ideas – on conspiracy theories, fandom, cults, self-obsession alongside the above-mentioned consumerism and celebrity – rather than character or plot development. This is deliberate but I felt it lacked substance and was left with lots of questions about the set-up, how and why of it all. An interesting and thought-provoking book but I expected more.

My thanks to 4th Estate, William Collins and Netgalley for the opportunity to read Something New Under the Sun.

The perfect beach read fully of zippy one liners and clever dialogue. I would highly recommend it, particularly if you want to lose yourself to a book.

A lengthy climate fiction / doomsday / near future dystopian romp set between a film set, a wild fire and a camp for grieving climate change believers. Most definitely out of my usual wheelhouse, and on the whole I find climate fiction to lack nuance and real life reflection, instead a one dimensional lens of crisis is used, and an author often thinks this is enough to achieve the ‘radical’ narrative meant to politicise the masses into recycling.

However I was happy to be corrected by Kleeman’s latest attempt. She uses the novel as an art form, rather than attempting to make a story into a polemic. We follow Patrick, a middle aged writer who finds himself in LA, wildfires to his left and a failing adaption of his beloved novel to his right.

His wife and daughter have moved to a rural commune with others who feel the loss of habitat and natural disaster too much to handle in their day to day lives. Kleeman makes a case for both the need to process the emotions of climate destruction and the forms of privilege which come with that.

The Californian drought circles the film set, a new kind of man made water is the only source of hydration for the west coast residents, although capitalism and greed have a hand in its delusional affects. We meet a fallen starlet who only drinks the old school liquid, and ropes Patrick in to uncover what is it about the new WATR makes young people lose thier memories, as Kleeman looks at caregiving, dementia and the failure of the American system.

It descends into a fever dream towards the end of the book, which I personally found wholly unsatisfactory, as not a single thread of narrative is resolved. It’s defended by Kleeman as an attempt to decentre the human from the end of world narrative we are fed, which I can concede is a smart way to end a book with unanswerable questions.

The ‘Hollywood Novel’ is a varied and interesting sub-genre that can vary from chick-lit and what they used to call the ‘bonkbuster’ to the experimental and literary end of the market. It has a lineage probably as long as the American film industry itself and takes in writers as different as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, John Fante, Joan Didion and Robert Stone. But personal vote would go for Don Carpenter’s Hollywood Trilogy but Something New Under the Sun could be said to fit into this sub-genre, unfortunately not wholly successfully.

But perhaps it’s not fully the book’s fault. Most of these books were written at a point in history when cinema could probably be described as the dominant cultural form — something that would be more difficult to argue these days. Perhaps we’re fast approaching the time where novels about the film industry have to take on that ‘past tense’ elegiacal feel that’s already hit books about the music industry (such as Taylor Reid Jenkins’s Daisy Jones the Six and Laura Barnett’s Greatest Hits). There was just something about the film production aspects of SNUTS (what an acronym!) that felt a little dated (if only by a decade or so).

Although you could argue that this isn’t really a Hollywood novel, that the movie business angle is set dressing to the books themes in the same way that film being made within it is set dressing to the dystopian caper at the heart of the plot. And yet, I did find myself being reminded most often of West’s Day of the Locust, certainly in its attempt to direct social commentary through the prism of Hollywood glamour.

But I’m not sure it really works. And I think at least part of the reason is that the novel never feels sure of what it’s trying to be and trying to say. As well as the Hollywood novels mentioned above, it feels in parts as if it’s trying to emulate the satire of Christopher’s Buckley’s novels but fails to have the laser-focused savagery of Buckley’s political commentary. There’s also a suggestion of Black Mirror dystopia in here but again it wavers in its convictions around the WAT-R (synthetic water) plot to really convince. The book as a whole flirts with questions of corporate exploitation and ecological Armageddon but never feels sufficiently sure of just what it’s trying to say about them. (It was perhaps a mistake reading this straight after Richard Powers’s Bewilderment with which this novel shares some thematic DNA but lacks Powers’s passionate and focused intensity, even if it thankfully doesn’t succumb to his sentimental streak.)

Tonally it tends to veer about a bit too much for my liking. The core plot is the possibly overly familiar one of the self-important author watching his beloved work being torn apart by the philistines of Hollywood (evoking everything from some of the novels mentioned above to movies like Barton Fink or Alan Alda’s Sweet Liberty). But this increasingly becomes dominated by the Chinatown-esque WAT-R conspiracy by way of the odd-couple-on-the-road sections with author-protagonist Patrick and the Lohan-like spoiled starlet Cassidy — which far more resemble Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild or perhaps even Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. There is, of course, nothing wrong with any of these influences but the sheer number that you can realistically evoke must surely suggest something of a ‘ADHD channel hopping’ deficiency to the narrative, as well as merely reminding the reader of the novel’s failure to live up to even one of them.

But the primary flaw is in the characters. There’s literally no one for you to give a damn about in the novel. Even the potentially redemptive figures of Patrick’s wife and daughter are left to marginal for us to become truly invested in. And Patrick and Cassidy themselves start out predictably self involved and unlikeable but never really change or improve throughout the story. Patrick spends the final third of the book in a state of increased mental and physical derangement (not unlike Tod Hackett in Day of the Locust) but it’s hard to really give the remotest damn about his plight.

Not that there isn't some good stuff in this novel. Much of it is very funny and some of Alexandra Kleeman’s observations about modern media culture are spot-on. Particularly delicious are the extended excerpts from the conspiracy-driven online fan messageboards dedicated to Cassidy’s defunct teen TV show and which perfectly capture the variously wide-eyed, sometimes ill-humoured and often just simply deranged nature of modern fan discourse. Making these more central to the plot of the book, instead of more window dressing, would have made the novel far more effective.

Patrick Hamlin leaves the east coast when his novel is turned into a film. This promises to be his big breakthrough, especially since Cassidy Carter is going to play the lead role. The young film and internet star is sure to attract a great audience. But from the start, Patrick has the sensation that strange things are going on. First, the bunch of youngsters who should care for him but do not seem to have a clue about the job and also Brenda and Jay who hardly show an interest in the film they are about to produce. That life on the west coast differs from his eastern home does not surprise Patrick, yet the extent is astonishing since people heavily rely on a product called WAT-R instead of the ordinary water he knows. At the beginning, he is just annoyed by all the things which seem to go wrong and Cassidy’s diva attitude, however, after a couple of days, the hints that there is something really going on behind the scenes are hard to ignore anymore and thus, Patrick starts to investigate.

Alexandra Kleeman‘s novel is the perfect read of the moment. Many people around the globe are unsure about what to believe and convinced that there is some kind of deep going conspiracy the ordinary people cannot see and therefore are just figures in a game without realising it. The ecological crisis with water shortage and raging wildfires in California is another aspect she cleverly incorporates into the plot.

The reader, together with Patrick, tries to make sense of the things he experiences in California while his wife and daughter at home seems to have fallen prey to a strange cult which goes into the complete opposite rejecting all modern technology and focussing on basic needs and a reduced life on a farm outside town. While worrying about his family, Patrick cannot see clear and lacks support in his mixed feelings about the incidents on the film set.

Cassidy is first presented in a way you would expect a young superstar to behave. However, her personality turns out to differ heavily from the public egocentric diva image thus revealing one of the few critically thinking and actually caring people.

Even though the idea behind the plot is great and alluring, it was hard for me to really indulge in the novel. Yet, I liked Kleeman’s style of writing and will surely look out to read more of her.

Sometimes you read a book which you know will stay with you and this, for me, was definitely one of those novels. Patrick Hamlin is a novelist, who travels to Hollywood to 'oversee' the film adaptation of one of his novels, "Elsinore Lane." However, once he gets his hand on the script, he finds his personal tale of his father's death has become something unrecognisable, while 'overseeing,' the film, means that he is mainly running errands for Executive Producers Jay Arkid and Brenda Billington. One of his jobs is to drive around starlet Cassidy Carter; previous child star of 'Kassi-Keene: Kid Detective.'

Patrick feels that his life is falling apart. His wife Alison and daughter, Nora, have relocated to a nature retreat called, 'Earthbridge,' where extinct creatures are mourned and Nora has visions. There is one pay phone and Alison seems uncontactable, leaving Patrick worrying, watching old Cassidy Carter shows and reading the message boards which spill over with conspiracy theories.

This novel is set in the near future and the main differences between then and now is that people rely on a chemical substitute for water, named 'WAT-R,' the countryside seems to be constantly on fire and people are suffering from a disease, called Random-Onset Acute Dementia (ROAD). When Patrick and Cassidy suspect a link between Jay and Brenda, WAT-R and ROAD, they embark on a strange road-trip to try to discover the truth and to find out what really matters.

Sometimes, books have odd couples, or pairings, and Patrick and Cassidy are certainly a strange combination, but work well together. Patrick is a man who is floundering in his career, and his marriage, while Cassidy is both outwardly confident and inwardly vulnerable. Cassidy has known the dark side of fame, but is always very much aware of how to use it. While people have plastic surgery to recreate her perfect nose, castigate or admire her on the internet, or watch her - all too public - meltdowns, she attempts to retain her dignity and her career. Sometimes sad, always thoughtful, the depth of the characters make this book worth reading. I received a copy of this book from the publishers, via NetGalley, for review.

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book. It was a very interesting read with insights into LA culture as well as important messages re how we are treating our planet. Great writing and an unusual premise, ideal for anyone stuck in a reading rut as it’s very different! Dark but funny too and a compelling read.

Patrick, a writer whose latest book is being turned into a film, is in Hollywood to assist (literally) on the set. Most of the area around Los Angeles is on fire, but life goes on. His wife Alison and his daughter Nora, both suffering from eco-anxiety, have gone to a retreat/commune, Erthbridge, where like-minded people meet and work the land, and have daily meetings to mourn species that have gone extinct, melted glaciers and other disasters. Cassidy Carter, a young actress who plays in the film, refuses to drink WAT-R, the trendy drink that replaces water - as only the East Coast still has running water. There is a new form of dementia going around, which may or may not be linked to WAT-R. It's all very grim but somehow this is the new normal and apart from Alison and Nora who feel the loss very painfully, everyone just gets on with things and adapt to this new reality.
The first two thirds of the book are quite slow as the scene is being set and we follow Patrick hour by hour, watching him drive from the set to Cassidy's house to pick her up, being stuck in traffic because the fires have blocked a road, picking up some WAT-R delivery on the way, trying to call his wife on the payphone near Earthbridge.... It is already looking pretty bad, and it gets worse as we reach the last third of the book - everything accelerates, and the consequences of a world now unfit for life finally reaches the main characters.
Kleeman is excellent at setting the scene - the menace is constant, from the fire to the WAT-R, to everyone just seemingly getting on with things, This is a more... accomplished and detailed book than "You too can have a body like mine" (which I also enjoyed) and an interesting book to read a day after the IPCC published their report on the climate emergency.

An intoxicating and atmospheric look at contemporary culture, Los Angeles, and climate anxiety - like Station Eleven mixed with BoJack Horseman. I absolutely loved it, even though I acknowledge it is a very acquired taste.