Clickbait : A Novel

With the dark comedy and sharp observations of Monica Heisey and Dolly Alderton, a whip-smart and laugh-out-loud funny debut novel about a disgraced, newly divorced journalist demoted to a "clickbait" job at a Manhattan tabloid. The first thing they tell you when you begin your training is never to become the news. �Natasha has screwed up royally. Her mistake isn't just embarrassing, it's a breach of journalistic ethics that makes headlines and costs her a plum job reporting from London. Back in New York at thirty-five and single, divorced from a kind man she loved, she finds herself at the bottom of the media food chain-a junior reporter at a clickbait factory, rewriting sensational tabloid stories to make them just different enough to avoid lawsuits. �As if her professional fall from grace weren't bad enough, she's taken the money she'd saved for a down payment for a home on a charming Brooklyn block with her husband, and rashly bought a boxy apartment overlooking the gray ocean in Rockaway Beach, Queens. �Though seeing friends and family only serves to remind her of what she's lost, things begin to pick up when her ex-boyfriend Zach moves back to New York and accepts her offer of a spare bedroom. The arrangement is strictly platonic, of course-for him. But Natasha can't help but wonder�whether he might be the solution to all her�problems. �As Natasha's obsession with Zach grows and her involvement in increasingly�dystopian "churnalism" deepens, her worlds threaten to collide in the most cataclysmic, extremely public way.