The Audacity

A bracing satire about the implosion of a Theranos-like company, a collapsing marriage, and a billionaires’ “philanthropy summit,” for fans of Hari Kunzru and The White Lotus

A bracing satire about the implosion of a Theranos-like company, a collapsing marriage, and a billionaires’ “philanthropy summit,” for fans of Hari Kunzru and The White Lotus.

In 72 hours, a blockbuster expose will reveal Victoria Stevens’s multibillion-dollar startup as a massive fraud. And Victoria has gone missing. Has she faked her death, leaving her husband, Guy Sarvananthan, to face the fallout- and potential jail time? Should Guy flee to his native Sri Lanka, an outcast and a failure? Or embrace denial? Opting for the latter, he takes the corporate jet to a private Caribbean island, where the 0.0001% have gathered to decide which one of the world’s biggest problems to “eradicate forever.” Guy drinks and drugs his way into oblivion, through manicured jungles and aboard superyachts, amid captains of industry, legions of staff, and unlikely saboteurs.

Meanwhile, Victoria narrates her side of the story from an off-the-grid location in the California desert. In scribbled diary entries shot through with cultish self-help mantras, she plots her comeback, confident she’ll prove everyone wrong. Again. Ryan Chapman’s incisive novel is a swan dive into the abyss and “Martin Amis’s Money for really late, late capitalism” (Amitava Kumar, author of A Time Outside This Time).

Author Biography

Ryan Chapman is a Sri Lankan-American writer originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and currently based in Kingston, New York. He is the author of Riots I Have Known, which NPR named “one of the smartest-and best-novels of the year,” among other accolades. His criticism and humor pieces have appeared in Bookforum, The New Yorker, The Guardian, McSweeney’s, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, and elsewhere.