Idol
Kuhusu kitabu hiki cha kusikiliza
Brought to you by Penguin.
'Follow your heart and speak your truth.'
For Samantha Miller's young fans - her 'girls' - she's everything they want to be. She's an oracle, telling them how to live their lives, how to be happy, how to find and honour their 'truth'.
And her career is booming: she's just hit three million followers, her new book Chaste has gone straight to the top of the bestseller lists and she's appearing at sell-out events.
Determined to speak her truth and bare all to her adoring fans, she's written an essay about her sexual awakening as a teenager, with her female best friend, Lisa. She's never told a soul but now she's telling the world. The essay goes viral.
But then - years since they last spoke - Lisa gets in touch to say that she doesn't remember it that way at all. Her memory of that night is far darker. It's Sam's word against Lisa's - so who gets to tell the story? Whose 'truth' is really a lie?
'You put yourself on that pedestal, Samantha. You only have yourself to blame.'
Riveting, compulsive and bold, IDOL interrogates our relationship with our heroes and explores the world of online influencers, asking how well we can ever really know those whose carefully curated profiles we follow online. And it asks us to consider how two memories of the same event can differ, and how effortlessly we choose which stories to believe.
'IDOL is fresh, glamorous, and surprising, taking an issue we all care about and with a deft twist, recalibrating our position. It dazzles us before revealing the darkness at its heart.' Marian Keyes
'A literary tour de force' Irish Independent
'A vital and necessary presence in contemporary literature' Sarah Perry
© Louise O'Neill 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022
Ukadiriaji na maoni
Kuhusu mwandishi
Louise O’Neill is a bestselling author from Clonakilty, West Cork. Her debut novel, Only Ever Yours, won multiple awards including the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year and the inaugural YA Book Prize. Her second novel, Asking For It, spent 52 consecutive weeks in the Irish top 10 and was awarded the Michael L Printz honour by the American Library Association.
She has since published The Surface Breaks, a feminist retelling of The Little Mermaid, which was shortlisted for the Specsavers National Book Awards, and three novels for adults: Almost Love, After the Silence — named Crime Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards 2020 — and Idol, which went straight into the Irish book charts at #1. Her memoir, A Bigger Life, is coming in autumn 2026. Whatever Happened to Madeline Stone? is her latest novel.
