Anna-Marie McLemore will make their adult fiction debut with a novel coming next year, the Dial Press announced in a news release.
The Penguin Random House imprint will publish McLemore’s The Influencers in the spring. It describes the novel as “a campy and escapist exploration of race, gender, sexuality, and class.”
McLemore had their literary debut in 2015 with the young adult fantasy novel The Weight of Feathers, and followed that up the next year with When the Moon Was Ours, which was named a best book of the year by Kirkus and longlisted for the National Book Award.
McLemore made the National Book Award longlist again in 2022 for Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix. Their other books include Dark and Deepest Red, The Mirror Season, and, most recently, Flawless Girls, which was published in May by Feiwel & Friends.
The Influencers will follow “Mother May I” Iverson, who gained online fame for posting videos of her five mixed-race daughters. In the novel, the daughters are grown, and the family is rocked by a murder and arson that has captivated the Internet.
The novel, the Dial Press says, “is an evisceration of influencer culture and how alienating traditional expectations can be, ripe for the current moment when the first generation of children made famous by their parents are, now, all grown up—and looking for retribution.”
The Influencers is slated for publication on April 15, 2025.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
