The Visitors
Format:Hardback
Publisher:And Other Stories
Published:7th Jun '22
Should be back in stock very soon
On the eve of the Occupy Wall Street protests, C is flat broke. Once a renowned textile artist, she’s now the sole proprietor of an arts supply store in Lower Manhattan. Divorced, alone, at loose ends, C is stuck with a struggling business, a stack of bills, a new erotic interest in her oldest girlfriend, and a persistent hallucination in the form of a rogue garden gnome with a pointed interest in systems collapse . . .
C needs to put her medical debt and her sex life in order, but how to make concrete plans with this little visitor haunting her apartment, sporting a three-piece suit and delivering impromptu lectures on the vulnerability of the national grid? Moreover, what’s all this computer code doing in the story of her life? And do the answers to all of C’s questions lie with an eco-hacktivist cabal threatening to end modern life as we know it?
Replaying recent history through a distorting glass, The Visitors is a mordantly funny tour through a world where not only civic infrastructure but our darkest desires (not to mention our novels) are vulnerable to malware; where mythical creatures talk like Don DeLillo; where love is little more than a blip in our metadata. It peers into How We Got Here and asks What We Do Next, charting the last days of a broken status quo as the path is cleared for something new.
‘Stevens' writing is vicious and cerebral, an enthralling combination. she has a lovely knack of hinting and alluding to goings-on elsewhere (the best kind of narration, imho). a cynical sophomore novel that deserves all the praise it will no doubt receive.’ Doug Riggs, Bank Square Books
‘[A] mordantly funny requiem for the early 21st century . . . The odd touch of magic does nothing to diminish the story’s uneasy relevance to the contemporary state of affairs. Fans of such paranoia masters as DeLillo and Pynchon should give this a look.’ Publishers Weekly
‘The Visitors is a slim book with a lot going on. . . The book accepts, and even delights in, the strenuous absurdity of its characters’ efforts to index the relationship between the virtual and the material, or to locate the source of reality in imagination.’ Daisy Hildyard, The Guardian
‘The Visitors is conceptually bold. Stevens threads through needles of political theory so deftly you barely feel them piercing the brain. Her work calmly suggests this: the apocalypse is coming for us all, baby – so, what are you doing about it?’ Annie Hayter, The Big Issue
‘It’s both a bold, imaginative play on very recent history and a trenchant prophecy of the terrifying times we’re collectively staring down the barrel of.’ Anna Cafolla, The Face Summer Reads 2022
‘As its semi-fictional world frays at every edge, we stay close with C., a deeply written character who could be any of us: beset by the stresses of debt, anxious about decisions made and decisions to come, yet filled with all the rich longing, desire, and tenderness that renews our humanity, even at the worst of times.’ Lithub, included in ‘35 Novels You Need to Read This Summer’
‘Here is a refreshing novel by an author willing to take chances...The Visitors stands as a pensive and important work...rare and exciting company.’ Necessary Fiction
‘“Is it possible to imagine something so fully that it takes on a life of its own? So many systems run only on belief.” It's possible that a novel, like this one, does, too.’ Star Tribune
‘The Visitors addresses it subjects through a blurry, somewhat hypnotic dance of symbols and signifiers.’ Wall Street Journal
‘It’s as if The Big Short were set in the dreamworld of Rachel Ingalls's Mrs. Caliban . . .’ Audrey Wollen, New York Times
ISBN: 9781913505288
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 412g
224 pages