Published in 2020
300 pages
Emily Temple was born in Syracuse, New York. She earned a BA from Middlebury College and an MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was the recipient of a Henfield Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in Colorado Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Indiana Review, Fairy Tale Review, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, and is a senior editor at Literary Hub, where she makes lists for a living.
What is this book about?
‘With dark, stylish prose and a group of teenage girls up to no good, The Lightness could be the love child of Donna Tartt and Tana French, but its savage, glittering magic is all Emily Temple’s own’ Chloe Benjamin, author of The Immortalists
One year ago, the person Olivia adores most in the world, her father, left home for a meditation retreat in the mountains and never returned. Yearning to make sense of his shocking departure, Olivia runs away from home and retraces his path to a place known as the Levitation Center.
There, she enrolls in their summer program for troubled teens, a ‘Buddhist Boot Camp for Bad Girls’, and finds herself drawn into the company of a close-knit trio of girls determined that this is the summer they will finally learn to levitate, to defy the weight of their bodies, to experience ultimate lightness.
But as desire and danger intertwine, and Olivia comes ever closer to discovering what a body – and a girl – is capable of, it becomes increasingly clear that this is an advanced and perilous practice, and there’s a chance not all of them will survive…A stylish, suspenseful meditation on adolescent desire, female friendship, and the female body that shimmers with rage, wit, and fierce longing – for fans of Emma Cline, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Jenny Offill
‘A darkly funny, luminously drawn mystery that hits bullseye after bullseye of language and emotion. The Lightness is a book I didn’t know I needed and now can’t stop thinking about: swift, surprising, and utterly captivating’ Téa Obreht, author of Inland and The Tiger’s Wife
‘Emily Temple’s sentences are extraordinary: musical, bristling with animal intelligence, feline in their tensed sinuosity, their lack of the usual loyalties, their readiness to pounce. This remarkable novel is made up of equal parts desire and dread; it constantly surprised me, eerily outpacing my expectations. The Lightness is a glorious debut’ Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
‘Emily Temple’s debut The Lightness grants us a bold, smart, hilarious new voice. She tells a page-turning story that’s also a detective story – psychologically wise and totally wise-assed, all while being both cynical and spiritual. A classic must read!’ Mary Karr, author of Lit
