Laura Sims

Looker Laura Sims

A dazzling, razor-sharp debut novel about a woman whose obsession with the beautiful actress on her block drives her to the edge.

In this superb new psychological thriller, an unraveling woman becomes fixated on her neighbor-the beautiful, successful actress. Trapped in a rundown apartment and dead-end job, the unnamed narrator is unhappily childless and recently separated. She can't help noticing with wry irony that the actress, meanwhile, has her face on the side of every bus, a gleaming brownstone, a handsome husband, and three beautiful children, including a baby. Though they live just a few doors apart, the two women are separated by a chasm of professional success and personal fulfillment.

Obsessed with her collapsed marriage, her relationship-ending infertility, the daily injustices she suffers at the hands of her expensive and exhausting city, and, most of all, with her movie-star neighbor, the narrator initially seems bitter but benign. Yet, as late summer turns to fall, she becomes increasingly unhinged-and, when an interaction with the actress at the annual block party takes a disastrous turn, what began as an innocent preoccupation spirals quickly, and lethally, into a dark and irretrievable madness.

Witty, playful, and searingly sharp, Looker is an enormously entertaining debut that is part tightly coiled Hitchcockian thriller and part sendup of those living their best lives in the post-gentrified, Instagram-ready city. Driven by a fresh, astonishing, and fearlessly original voice, this slender novel packs a powerful punch.