Agnes Lives!
A Novel
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Agnes Lives!
Narrated by:
Hallie Elizabeth Newton
Pre-order Now for £13.02
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Narrated by:
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Hallie Elizabeth Newton
A day-in-the-life debut novel about a fading socialite on the hunt for someone to kill her before her next SoulCycle class.
"A tale of suspense, a statement, a cry for help, and a delicious tour-de-force.” --Nell Zink
New York City, 2014. Agnes Maurer seeks a willing murderer and wonders what she should wear. Candidates include: an icy magazine editor with a special cutlery set; an eccentric designer from her past; and Agnes’s cruel novelist boyfriend. As she Ubers from Upper East Side shopping to Craigslist gun deals, Agnes’ desperation becomes an exhibition, a swan song of millennial sexuality as internalized abuse and consummate style, with the knob righty-tightened all the way.
Newton's prose is disturbingly fun, relentless, shattering. A crafted study of existential despair that culminates in a worthy, intense denouement.©2026 Hallie Elizabeth Newton (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Critic reviews
An astonishing debut as mesmerizing as it is unnerving. Like a surreal film it unfolds before us vivid as a nightmare from which we are unable to look away; by turns wildly funny, harrowing, and moving.
We've had to wait too long for Hallie Newton. Everybody feels like her—at our best, at our worst—but there isn’t another person who sounds like her. And now here she finally is. An astonishing—a powerfully good—writer. Agnes Lives! is like an undertow reaching for your ankles—and then suddenly you’re out into the deep waters, with a view that is overall and surprisingly lovely. Hallie Newton writes like nobody else: deeper, sharper, truer, utterly without fear. We needed her for a long time. Here she is. Agnes Lives! is the debut we’ve waited on, the best I’ve read in forever.
Unsettling, compelling, mysterious, and also, well, so fun to read. Newton's first novel is a marvelous debut.
The closest I've ever been to the world of this novel was when I used to use the ladies room at Bergdorf's, which was on a high floor but right next to the elevator. It took me serious acclimation to settle in, as if it were one of those science fiction novels full of invented common nouns. Then it took off, like a runaway stagecoach pulled by the four horsemen of the apocalypse. When I realized what its metafictional project was--not to kill off Agnes, though there's nothing she wants more--I wanted to write Newton a fan letter. Agnes Lives! is a tale of suspense, a statement, a cry for help, and a delicious tour-de-force of the higher consumerist sleaze porn morass.
A ferocious New York novel. Woodcutters meets Eyes Wide Shut.
Agnes Lives! is a ferociously smart debut. Hallie Elizabeth Newton is Jean Rhys for the SoulCycle generation. Agnes is an indelible, gimlet-eyed narrator with a deceptively tender heart. If you spent the Obama era tapping it back in Lululemon, consider yourself trigger-warned.
Frenzied and propulsive, Newton’s debut captures a mind that refuses to quiet.
[A] whirlwind, wholly original debut novel . . . Told strictly in Agnes' voice (even the dialogue is one-sided), this is a deep dive into a millennial mind in free fall. It's dark but also funny, disturbing yet identifiable, and while it goes off the rails toward the end, it's a trip worth taking.
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