Dear Charlie

An exhilarating, hilarious, heartbreaking first novel about a woman under the spell of an eccentric new pen pal, an obsession that escalates into an acute episode of psychosis.

The narrator of Dear Charlie is 34.7 years old, of Jewish South African parentage, sleeping intermittently at the hospital where her mother is receiving cancer treatment, and contemplating the wreckage of her editorial career after a spectacular firing from a schmancy lifestyle magazine. In this state, she begins an exciting phone friendship with Charles Hunnewell Gaines: trustafarian, rent-free inhabitant of an illegal loft in Industry City, friend of contemporary art, texter of semi-erotic poems.

A wild journey, seen through the prism of the narrator’s texts to Charlie and the shambolic autobiographical novel in progress she recites to indifferent bystanders, ensues—moving from New York City to Los Angeles, with flashbacks to Cape Town and the Tsitsikamma. As her infatuation with Charlie intensifies, so too does her irreverent, increasingly dangerous madness.

In a feat of stylistic brilliance, with a voice of wondrous originality, Gemma Sieff delivers an epistolary novel for our chaotic times that unflinchingly confronts loss, limerence, addiction, privilege, race, and class. Dear Charlie blends high style with a knowing wink, and also, somehow, an innocence. It is funny and sad, fierce and tender—a stunning debut novel filled with all of life’s turbulent joy and sorrow.