How to Be Somebody Else

An uncoming-of-age in New York City

How to Be Somebody Else by Miranda Pountney offers a captivating narrative that explores identity and transformation amidst the bustling life of New York City.

'Has literary oomph' — Sunday Times

'An impressive debut novel' — Observer

'Intelligent, confident and original' — Times Literary Supplement

Spring 2015, New York.

On the surface, Dylan has achieved the impossible - a life in New York, eight years of making this stick. And yet it is not the thing she'd imagined (what had she imagined?). When she walks out of her career, then apartment, and into a housesit for an artist she's never met, she does not tell her friends, her parents back in England, or Matt, her boyfriend, living on the West Coast.

Job-free, rent-free, she'll make good on her book, herself, other things too, she's thinking, when her neighbour Kate shows up and invites her to a party. There she meets Gabe, who happens to be married to Kate but insists, 'it's not a thing'. The affair that follows consumes her and she begins to consider what is fixed and what is variable. Can a person be both? Is Gabe the thing he seems? Is she?

As spring turns to summer, her experiments in living test loyalties and boundaries until an unexpected encounter between the two couples forces her to confront her future.

'Brilliant... Luscious prose' — Annie Lord

'Unsettling and original' — Tessa Hadley

A Marie Claire Best Book of 2024