Clickbait

With the dark comedy and sharp observations of Monica Heisey and Dolly Alderton, this whip-smart and laugh-out-loud funny debut novel about starting over follows 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. This new forced proximity arrangement is strictly platonic, of course—for him. But Natasha can't help but wonder whether this second chance romance might be the solution to all her problems.

 As Natasha's obsession with Zach grows and her involvement in increasingly dystopian "churnalism" deepens, this darkly comedic novel builds as her worlds threaten to collide in the most cataclysmic, extremely public way.

Holly Baxter is an executive editor and staff writer at the Independent in New York. She has experience in generating clicks on both sides of the Atlantic, having worked in the Independent’s London office as a reporter for three years. Her work was shortlisted for a Press Award for Feature of the Year in 2019 and she often appears on British radio and television. Baxter lives in Brooklyn, New York.