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The Rich People Have Gone Away

The Rich People Have Gone Away

Summary

Ordinary New Yorkers are brought together in a story of betrayal, race, what connects us to each other – and what sets us apart

***A ROXANE GAY BOOK CLUB 2024 SELECTION***


'A marvel... A masterpiece' PAUL HARDING

'Prescient and profound' BRYAN WASHINGTON

Brooklyn, 2020. Theo Harper and his blonde, blue-eyed, pregnant wife Darla head upstate to their summer cottage to wait out the lockdown. Not everyone in their fancy apartment building has this privilege: not Xavier, the restless teenager in the Cardi B t-shirt, nor Darla’s black best friend Ruby and her partner Katsumi, who stay behind to save their restaurant.

During an upstate hike, Theo lets slip a long-held secret about his mixed-up ancestry – and when Darla disappears after the ensuing argument, he suddenly finds himself the prime suspect at the centre of a front-page police search for the perfect missing woman.

'A lush study' RAVEN LEILANI

'Riveting and original' CHARMAINE WILKERSON

Reviews

  • Regina Porter has written another marvel of a novel. The Rich People Have Gone Away gives the reader a spiraling cross-section of richly drawn, impeccably observed New Yorkers... A kind of masterpiece of human portraiture that simultaneously renders quintessential depictions of the city, of America, and of the whole world in these first fraught decades of the 21st century
    Paul Harding, author of This Other Eden

About the author

Regina Porter

Regina Porter is an award-winning playwright and author of The Travelers, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and longlisted for the Orwell Political Fiction Prize. A graduate of the MFA fiction program at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, her writing has been published in the Harvard Review, Tin House and Oxford Review.
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