Dead in Long Beach, California

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2024. One of NPR's 2024 Books We Love. Longlisted for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize.

Coral is the first person to discover the body of her brother, Jay, in the wake of his suicide. There's no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother.

Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire, becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reck­less determination, she doubles—and triples—down on posing as her brother, risking not only her sanity but also her relationship with her precocious niece, Khadija.

As Coral's swirl of lies closes in on her, the quirky and mysterious alien world of Wildfire becomes entangled with her own reality, in the pro­cess pushing long-buried memories, traumas, and secrets dangerously into the present.

A form-shifting and soul-crunching chronicle of grief and crisis, Venita Blackburn's debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is a fleet-footed marvel of self-discovery and storytelling that explores the depths of humankind's capacity for harm and healing. With the daring, often hilarious imagination that made her an acclaimed short-fiction innovator, Blackburn crafts a layered, page-turning reckoning with what it means to be alive, dead, and somewhere in between.