How to Be Somebody Else

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Exquisitely written, sublimely fraught and erotically charged, How to Be Somebody Else is an uncoming of age in New York City

Spring 2015, New York.

On the surface Dylan has achieved the impossible - a life in New York, eight years of making this stick. And yet it is not the thing she'd imagined (what had she imagined?). When she walks out of her career, then apartment, and into a housesit for an artist she's never met, she does not tell her friends, her parents back in England, or Matt, her boyfriend, living on the West Coast.

Job-free, rent-free, she'll make good on her book, herself, other things too, she's thinking, when her neighbour Kate shows up and invites her to a party. There she meets Gabe, who happens to be married to Kate but insists, 'it's not a thing'. The affair that follows consumes her and she begins to consider what is fixed and what is variable. Can a person be both? Is Gabe the thing he seems? Is she?

As spring turns to summer, her experiments in living test loyalties and boundaries until an unexpected encounter between the two couples forces her to confront her future.

©2024 Miranda Pountney (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

  • How to Be Somebody Else has literary oomph… What sets this debut apart is the way it sustains its sparky style to the last page without stinting on the serious stuff

    Sunday Times

  • Sharp and entertaining

    Daily Mail

  • Brutal and brilliant, in luscious prose, How to Be Somebody Else shows us what happens when life starts to unfurl

    Annie Lord, author of Notes on Heartbreak

  • Unsettling and original

    Tessa Hadley, author of After the Funeral

  • So sharp and well observed. I loved the wry, understated humour, and how perceptive the book is about female desire. In its exploration of a woman trying to make sense of herself it is moving without being sentimental, and clever without seeming to try too hard

    Rebecca Wait, author of I'm Sorry You Feel That Way

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