Description:
"An astonishing debut as mesmerizing as it is unnerving." --Joyce Carol Oates
A day-in-the-life debut novel about a fading socialite on the hunt for someone to kill her before her next SoulCycle class.
"A tale of suspense, a statement, a cry for help, and a delicious tour-de-force." --Nell Zink
Brief description: Hallie Elizabeth Newton was born in Mississippi. A recipient of NYU's Goldwater Fellowship, she won first prize for fiction in Columbia Journal's 2020 Winter Contest. Agnes Lives! is her debut novel. She lives in New York.
Review Quotes:
"Wanting to die after a punishing SoulCycle class may not be unique, but Agnes's resolve to find someone to actually murder her is. As the misfit socialite goes about one frenetic New York City day, she evaluates a handful of would-be killers: her stone-cold magazine editor, a Craigslist arms dealer, a politician she once dated, her novelist boyfriend. A fast-paced stream-of-consciousness fever dream that feels like a front-row seat to her unraveling." --People Magazine, "Best Books of June 2026"
"An astonishing debut as mesmerizing as it is unnerving. Like a surreal film it unfolds before us vivid as a nightmare from which we are unable to look away; by turns wildly funny, harrowing, and moving." --Joyce Carol Oates, National Humanities Medal, NBCC's Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, and National Book Award-winning author of FOX "There's plenty of reference catnip for a niche reader in this hip, propulsive tale . . . [Newton's] style is electrically distinctive. In pyrotechnic passages, she recreates the vibe and tenor of an internet that's just on the edge of turning sour. Sentences that fizzle and scorch will also appeal to fans of Jade Sharma and Mary Robison, other bards of women on the absolute verge. Agnes is emphatically not for everyone, but I was thrilled . . . to encounter this voice." --Literary Hub "A blistering manifesto of a book that crams so much into its pages; a kind of reverse American Psycho telling the story of one woman downtrodden by mid-2010's rat race existence in New York. As wild, unexpected, and original as a hypnotic Instagram spiral, it's hard to believe this is a debut novel." --The Southern Bookseller Review "[A] whirlwind, wholly original debut novel . . . Told strictly in Agnes' voice (even the dialogue is one-sided), this is a deep dive into a millennial mind in free fall. It's dark but also funny, disturbing yet identifiable, and while it goes off the rails toward the end, it's a trip worth taking." --Booklist "It took me a minute to pick up on this novel's sly humor, but once I did, I was all in . . . The novel, which chronicles New York City life in the 2000s and 2010s for an unhappy privileged person, reminds me of Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, except that it does an even better job at making fun of the hipster era." --Publishers Weekly, "PW Picks" "Ambitious and risky . . it's one of the most riotously funny novels of the year . . . Agnes Lives! is more than meets the eye-both a serrated knife and a child's play cutlery utensil." --Our Culture "A remarkable inversion of Spark's original conceit." --Colorado Review "Unsettling, compelling, mysterious, and also, well, so fun to read. Newton's first novel is a marvelous debut." --Rivka Galchen, author of EVERYONE KNOWS YOUR MOTHER IS A WITCH "We've had to wait too long for Hallie Newton. Everybody feels like her-at our best, at our worst-but there isn't another person who sounds like her. And now here she finally is. An astonishing-a powerfully good-writer. Agnes Lives! is like an undertow reaching for your ankles-and then suddenly you're out into the deep waters, with a view that is overall and surprisingly lovely. Hallie Newton writes like nobody else: deeper, sharper, truer, utterly without fear. We needed her for a long time. Here she is. Agnes Lives! is the debut we've waited on, the best I've read in forever." --David Lipsky, New York Times bestselling author of THE PARROT AND THE IGLOO "The closest I've ever been to the world of this novel was when I used to use the ladies room at Bergdorf's, which was on a high floor but right next to the elevator. It took me serious acclimation to settle in, as if it were one of those science fiction novels full of invented common nouns. Then it took off, like a runaway stagecoach pulled by the four horsemen of the apocalypse. When I realized what its metafictional project was--not to kill off Agnes, though there's nothing she wants more--I wanted to write Newton a fan letter. Agnes Lives! is a tale of suspense, a statement, a cry for help, and a delicious tour-de-force of the higher consumerist sleaze porn morass." --Nell Zink, author of SISTER EUROPE "A ferocious New York novel. Woodcutters meets Eyes Wide Shut." --Amie Barrodale, author of TRIP "Agnes Lives! is a ferociously smart debut. Hallie Elizabeth Newton is Jean Rhys for the SoulCycle generation. Agnes is an indelible, gimlet-eyed narrator with a deceptively tender heart. If you spent the Obama era tapping it back in Lululemon, consider yourself trigger-warned." --Isabel Kaplan, author of NSFW "Frenzied and propulsive, Newton's debut captures a mind that refuses to quiet." --Anna Dorn, author of AMERICAN SPIRITS