Book Buzz: Agnes Lives! by Hallie Elizabeth Newton
"Agnes Lives! is a 24 hour novel. I had all of these feelings in 2018, 2020, that I was trying to find an outlet for. So I started creating this character in snatches of daily life. What would it be like for this character to go shopping, or try to buy a gun in Chinatown, and so on. And as I started to write this, I discovered more and more of her, and I thought the 24 hour time period would add a propulsive clock to the piece.”
― Hallie Elizabeth Newton, InterviewBooks Are Magic with David Lipsky
What booksellers are saying about Agnes Lives!
- Agnes Lives! explores themes of self-worth and self-indulgence in a pitiless world that demands women be everything to everyone at all times, highlighting the push and pull of embracing or rejecting those demands. Said demands push Agnes to the absolute extremes. This is a literary thriller that all strange book lovers are going to devour. I loved it!
― Jenny, Bookmarks, Winston-Salem, North Carolina | BUY - Funny, delirious, shocking, and a wild, wild goose chase of a time. You'll root for Agnes in her search for a potential killer and cheer every time she gets closer to reaching her goal.
― Joshua, The Underground Bookshop, Carrolton, Georgia| BUY - 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 down-trodden 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.
― Doron, Octavia Books, New Orleans, Louisiana | BUY - Agnes is like a piece of glass that our patriarchal, image-obsessed society has trampled all over...a smart commentary on toxic femininity, on being an aging woman, on the ways women feel pressured to sacrifice their bodies at the altars of men, on all the toxic little crimes men commit against women and women commit against themselves. It’s full of killer lines and insights about our culture and the characterization is precise and blazing. This novel is as enraging as it is insightful. So if you like chaotic, weird girl Lit. Fic. with an unhinged woman on an equally unhinged mission then take a big bite, this one’s worth the calories.
― Savannah, The Country Bookshop, Southern Pines, North Carolina | BUY
About Hallie Elizabeth Newton
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.
