State of Paradise: A Novel

"A wholly original and epically engaging novel from a master of episodic oddity" (Rachel Yoder), available now in paperback

It’s another summer in a small Florida town. After an illness that vanishes as mysteriously as it arrived, everything appears to be getting back to normal: soul-crushing heat, torrential downpours, sinkholes swallowing the earth, ominous cats, a world-bending virtual reality device being handed out by a company called ELECTRA, and an increasing number of posters dotting the streets with the faces of missing citizens. Living in her mother’s home, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author tracks the eerie changes. On top of everything else, she’s contending with family secrets, spotty memories of her troubled youth, a burgeoning cult in the living room, and the alarming expansion of her own belly button.

Then, during a violent rainstorm, her sister goes missing. She returns a few days later, sprawled on their mother’s lawn and speaking of another dimension. Now the ghostwriter must investigate not only what happened to her sister and the other missing people but also the uncanny connections between ELECTRA, the famous author she works for, and reality itself.

A sticky, rain-soaked reckoning with the elusive nature of selfhood and storytelling, Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise is an intricate and page-turning whirlwind. With inimitable control and thrilling style, van den Berg reaches deep into the void and returns with a story far stranger than either reality or fiction.

About the Author

Laura van den Berg was born and raised in Florida. She is the author of the novels Find Me and The Third Hotel, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and three story collections, including The Isle of Youth and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, which was named one of the ten best fiction books of 2020 by Time. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bard Fiction Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Prize, and a MacDowell Fellowship, and she is a two-time finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She lives in the Hudson Valley.