PEOPLE PERSON is as unrelenting as its anti-heroine; a summer-to-remember tale revitalized and made unforgettably new with chilly glee.

PEOPLE PERSON
by Brad Gira
Viking, Spring 2027
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

No one really likes Jodie, but no one bullies her either. She inspires too much apathy for the popular kids she reveres to bother.

As graduation approaches, Jodie accepts that she will never see her crush again: Caelab, the carelessly charismatic, sporty bad boy who would never recognize a girl like her. Then, on the night of graduation, Caelab dies drunk driving and Jodie’s chances of getting with Caelab plummet from implausible to impossible. In the aftermath Jodie crosses paths with Caelab’s various memorials and quickly nserts herself into the life of Caelab’s identical (albeit preppier) twin, Adam, who soaks up her seeming concern at a time of acute suffering.

Though strained and occasionally hostile, their summer fling moves fast, nudging Jodie up the social ladder she’d long watched from afar, even as the twins’ friends remain confused by her presence.

But by summer’s end a quiet suspicion takes hold: is Adam really the twin she’s been left with? The possibility of deception fills Jodie’s mind with both hope and dread. As she races to confirm that she has been with her true crush all along, her elaborate scheme backfires, putting herself (and the surviving twin) in grave danger.

What first appears to be a classic coming-of-age story of delayed jutice—an unfairly overlooked teen outcast finally gets her due—instead reveals itself as the eerie rise of an unremarkable young woman made increasingly terrifying by her determination to capture a taste of life among the admired, envied desirables. Brad Gira’s ruthlessly assured, stealthily profound debut charts this fraught affair from its grisly beginning to its grisly end.

Brad Gira is a playwright who was raised in Maryland and now lives in New York. PEOPLE PERSON is his very first novel.