'Tulathimutte is a big talent.’
Private Citizens
‘The first great millennial novel’ New York Magazine.
Tony Tulathimutte
‘A brilliant novel – whip smart, hilarious and entirely engrossing’ Emma Cline, author of The Girls
‘Tulathimutte is a big talent’ Jonathan Franzen, author of Purity
‘An eloquent social novel bristling with logic’ Nell Zink, Financial Times, Best Summer Books of 2016
*A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016 – SELECTED BY JONATHAN FRANZEN*
From a brilliant new literary talent comes a sweeping comic portrait of privilege, ambition and friendship – dubbed ‘the first great millennial novel’ by New York Magazine.
Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the noughties, Private Citizens embraces the contradictions of our new century. Call it a gleefully rude comedy of manners, a Middlemarch for Millennials. The novel’s four whip-smart narrators – idealistic Cory, Internet-lurking Will, awkward Henrik, and vicious Linda – are torn between fixing the world and cannibalizing it. In boisterous prose that ricochets between humour and pain, the four estranged friends stagger through the Bay Area’s maze of tech start-ups, protestors, gentrifiers, karaoke bars, house parties and cultish self-help seminars, washing up in each other’s lives once again.
A wise and searching depiction of a generation grappling with privilege and finding grace in failure, Private Citizens is as expansively intelligent as it is full of heart.
Reviews
Jonathan Franzen, author of Purity and Freedom
‘Although the four protagonists don’t shower themselves in glory, their creator certainly does.’
Independent
‘At its very best it strikes one as a particularly savage episode of Seinfeld.’
Big Issue
‘A sketch of the way US millennials, and the only slightly older men and women who employ them, live now’.
Spectator
‘Tulathimutte’s scalpel of cultural dissection is very sharp indeed…[his] verve and linguistic agility reminiscent of the best literary comic performers…Hilarious and relentlessly uncompromising…he has everything it takes to become a great American novelist’.
Literary Review
‘A brilliant novel – whip smart, hilarious and entirely engrossing.’
Emma Cline, author of The Girls
‘In this lovingly portrayed hell, the body is excess baggage, and selfdoubt poses dangers so grave only a writer would risk it. It’s not a satire, but an eloquent social novel bristling with logic.’
Nell Zink, Financial Times, Best Summer Books of 2016
‘The quality and confidence of Tulathimutte’s writing is evident throughout the book…Private Citizens works so well because there’s a realness to everything the characters experience. This is not parody or satire, just the sometimes grotesque behaviour of millennials under a searing spotlight’.
The Irish Times
‘[A] thrillingly sceptical vision of the noughties’.
Herald
‘If Evelyn Waugh and Tom Wolfe had a baby, one who wrote sensibly about the subset of people that Dave Eggers has written about whimsically, that baby would probably be Tony Tulathimutte and the book would be Private Citizens…A hilarious portrait of youthful self-centeredness.’
The Paris Review
‘My literary accessory of choice is Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens.’
Vogue
‘I didn’t know if I wanted to read a novel about screwed-up Stanford grads in 2007, but when it’s this caustically smart and funny, it turns out I like nothing better.’
Entertainment Weekly
