Get Free Shipping on orders over $79
The Visitors (Paperback Edition) - Jessi Jezewska Stevens

The Visitors (Paperback Edition)

By: Jessi Jezewska Stevens

Paperback | 6 February 2024

At a Glance

Paperback


RRP $32.99

$32.75

or 4 interest-free payments of $8.19 with

 or 

Ships in 15 to 25 business days

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?
The Visitors is mordantly funny as it follows a woman dealing with debt, lust and an unwelcome visitor in the last days of a broken status quo. It peers into How We Got Here and asks What We Do Next, whatever our personal hallucinations may be.

Industry Reviews

'It's as if The Big Short were set in the dreamworld of Rachel Ingalls's Mrs. Caliban . . .' Audrey Wollen, New York Times


'The Visitors addresses it subjects through a dance of symbols and signifiers.' Wall Street Journal


'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


'You might not think Occupy Wall Street and prophetic garden gnomes would fit together within the confines of the same narrative. Now, here's Jessi Jezewska Stevens's new novel The Visitors to make the case that, yes, the two can mesh together seamlessly. It's the kind of ambitious, madcap narrative combination that's all too rare nowadays.' Tobias Carroll, Tor.com


'Elements of the novel (particularly its exploration of cybernetics as a ubiquitous controller of domestic life) recall the work of such 20th-century greats as DeLillo, but Stevens' voice - which is meticulous, wide ranging, and moored in a different perspective from the 20th century's predominantly white male hegemonies - makes her work particularly suited for the current century's artistic needs. Ambitious and powerful - a remarkable novel.' Kirkus Review, starred review

More in Modern & Contemporary Fiction

The Shock of the Light - Lori Inglis Hall

RRP $34.99

$22.99

34%
OFF
Pilbara - Judy Nunn

Paperback

RRP $34.99

$19.99

43%
OFF
The Secretest of Secretisms - Dave Beige

RRP $32.99

$26.99

18%
OFF
Bugger - Michael Mohammed Ahmad

Paperback

RRP $34.99

$28.75

18%
OFF
This Book Made Me Think of You - Libby Page

RRP $34.99

$22.99

34%
OFF
Murder On The Marlow Belle : The Marlow Murder Club Mysteries 4 - Robert Thorogood
Theo of Golden - Allen Levi

RRP $32.99

$26.99

18%
OFF
Soft Serve - George Kemp

Paperback

RRP $29.99

$24.99

17%
OFF
Between Sisters - Kristin Hannah

RRP $34.99

$19.99

43%
OFF
Half His Age - Jennette McCurdy

Paperback

RRP $32.99

$22.99

30%
OFF
In a Common Hour - Sita Walker

RRP $34.99

$22.99

34%
OFF
Muttonfish Magic - Ruth Simms

RRP $27.99

$23.75

15%
OFF
Lost Lambs - Madeline Cash

Paperback

RRP $34.99

$22.99

34%
OFF
Hot Chocolate on Thursday - Michiko Aoyama

RRP $34.99

$19.99

43%
OFF