After Care
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Verve Books
Publishing:22nd Oct '26
£10.99
This title is due to be published on 22nd October, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Grace is no longer famous. She sits alone in her New York apartment, endlessly watching reruns of herself on the reality TV show Speed Daters. Then, one evening, a man breaks in through her window. A rare, still-obsessed fan or raging incel - Grace is unsure. Before she can find out, he disappears.
That same night, the world is rocked by the news that Anoushka, Grace's onscreen rival, has taken her own life. Suddenly thrust back into the public eye, Grace is thrilled to be relevant again. Driven by a familiar desperation for love and attention, she clings to the dregs of her old life: her followers; her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Cal; and her unstable influencer income.
But fame is fickle, and Grace's image is fragile. When the fans begin to turn on her, Grace escapes with Cal to his isolated cabin. In the woods with nothing but each other, can they mend what's broken without destroying what little is left?
A piercing debut exposing the toxicities of reality TV and influencer culture, After Care is a disconcertingly recognisable portrait of reckless consumerism, spectatorship and the attention economy.
Bold and haunting, After Care dissects the delusions of fame, parasocialism and the attention economy. Who do we become when we're being watched? And what happens when people stop? Maniar has written a taut and intricate study that refuses easy answers -- Stacey Yu, author of Kitten
Dark, so shrewdly observed, and written in beautiful, dreamlike prose, After Care is as compulsive as the reality TV it skewers. It made me squirm and I couldn't look away from it -- Hannah Beer, author of I Make My Own Fun
After Care is a pitch-perfect and utterly compelling portrait of one of modern society's most ubiquitous and troubling figures - the reality TV star turned influencer - and of how far any of us might be willing to go for the illusory approval of strangers on the other side of a screen -- Naomi Xu Elegant, author of Gingko Season
After Care crackles with sharp insight into the human condition and wry comment on the 21st century world it does its business in. Here is a writer to watch -- Laird Hunt, author of Zorrie
Searing, visceral and sincerely uncomfortable, but like a deep dark doomscroll into the psyche of 2026, I found that I just couldn't look away. An unmissable debut. Let it jab at your tender insecurities -- Genevieve Jagger, author of Fragile Animals
ISBN: 9780857309600
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
288 pages