Attention: we are getting a “sibling sequel” to A Visit from the Goon Squad.
At long last! Jennifer Egan is not only publishing a new novel but it’s a “sibling sequel” to her Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Critics Circle-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad.
Like Goon Squad, The Candy House features a cast of intersecting characters: a tech tycoon who spearheads a new era of online sharing, an anthropologist who inadvertently helped spark this digital innovation, and so-called “eluders” who cling to privacy and anonymity and their adversarial “proxies” who take on their identities.
There’s also a host of other bit players: record producers, aging rock stars and movie stars, spies, publicists, writers, academics, mothers, fathers, and children. The novel takes us across the nation, from San Francisco to New York, to the suburbs, tech offices, the desert, and the “mysterious nation of X.”
Egan said that she began thinking about expanding A Visit from the Goon Squad before it had even officially hit bookstore shelves: “I had already begun to imagine my way beyond A Visit from the Goon Squad even before it was published. The Candy House follows a number of its peripheral characters into their own futures and pasts to create an independent work with a new set of preoccupations and center of gravity, but equal affinity for technology, humor, and structural freedom. I’m thrilled to be publishing it with Scribner.”
Scribner will publish the novel on April 5, 2022. A simultaneous audio edition will be published by Simon & Schuster Audio. Next year can’t come soon enough!
