Unprecedented Times by Malavika Kannan

Pre-order publishes 21 September
 
Malavika Kannan establishes herself as an inimitable voice of Gen Z in this piercing coming-of-age debut novel.

Which comes first: experience or narrative? Rishi thinks she knows the answer as she arrives on campus for her first year at Stanford. A burnt-out youth climate activist, she used to want to save the world, but now she just wants to have gay sex. Her plan is set—she’s going to leave behind the strict trappings of her Indian American childhood in Florida, study literature, experiment with love, and write all about it. Within a few months, she makes her first best friend, falls in love with her situationship, and promptly gets her heart broken.

What is not a part of Rishi’s plan is the onset of the COVID pandemic. As the outside world becomes a terrifying place, she increasingly finds solace in the friendships she’s made. Instead of virtual college, however, Rishi and her classmates join a farm collective, where their political discussions and growing disillusionment collide with sexual tension and responsibility. It’s only when those relationships start fracturing under the stress of careless decisions, unrequited crushes, jealousies, and, yes, unprecedented times, that Rishi begins to question her own story.

Unprecedented Times captures the beauty, humor, pain, and straight-up chaos that exist in relationships between best friends and lovers, mothers and daughters, and between storytellers and themselves. Malavika Kannan’s fresh, arresting novel is a testament to the power of self-narrative for Gen Z American women: of writing oneself into existence where no previous script exists.
 
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'Malavika Kannan’s debut book for adults is many things — a campus novel, a coming-of-age story, a pandemic saga — but for a certain audience, relatable may also make the list.' - People Magazine
 
'Kannan is unafraid to write a queer woman of color as a real human person, with all the complexities and flaws that being human entails. Rishi is an audacious, acerbic, and unintentionally hilarious narrator. . . . Ultimately, Unprecedented Times is really a story about unprecedented love — romantic, platonic, and familial — and how it creeps up on you when you least expect it.' - Autostraddle
 
'Malavika Kannan’s Unprecedented Times pulses with longing, intelligence, and the slippery thrills of trying to turn life into art. Kannan tracks the unruly force of Rishi’s mind with energy, wit, and tenderness. Rishi is deeply alive on the page—searching, funny, cutting, horny, insecure, grandiose, politically aware, and vulnerable. I loved her. This is a portrait of youth in crisis, but also of queer friendship and self-making: of coming of age in a burning world, of the ways we invent and undermine ourselves, of the ways intimacy can become both shelter and wreckage. Vivid and ambitious, sharp and moving, this debut confirms Kannan as a voice and mind to watch.' - Sarah Thankam Mathews