| Author/Contributor(s): | Gasda, Matthew |
| Publisher: | Arcade |
| Date: | 9/8/2026 |
| Binding: | Hardcover |
| Condition: | NEW |
There are novels that describe consciousness and novels that enact it. Stranger Beauty is of the latter. With its narrative spun out of three notebooks, an embedded screenplay, and a final monologue delivered by an AI that has legally consumed a dead man’s life’s work, Matthew Gasda’s formally daring prose carries a powerful emotional resonance.
The architecture of the novel is not a stunt. Each section burrows, dreamlike, into a single psyche through repetition, contradiction, and the slow surfacing of things that were never meant to be seen. A marriage as alchemy. A brother lost to madness who emerges as the moral center of everything. And an artificial rendering of a man that speaks with more honesty than the living ever managed to accomplish.
An ambitious and original novel, Stranger Beauty is also deeply heartbreaking.