Dead in Long Beach, California

Coral is the first to find her brother Jay's body after his suicide, with no note and only a phone full of unanswered texts. Rather than tell anyone, she starts responding to those texts as Jay, spiraling deeper into the impersonation over the course of a single week while trying to hold together her relationship with his young daughter.

Venita Blackburn interlaces Coral's unraveling with passages from Wildfire, her own hit dystopian novel, as the boundary between Coral's fiction and her grief-distorted reality collapses — a formally inventive, often darkly funny novel about denial, storytelling, and the strange logic of loss.