Jennifer Egan is working on a companion book to her acclaimed novel A Visit From the Goon Squad, the author revealed on an episode of the podcast Bookable.
In a conversation with Susan Choi (Trust Exercise), Egan said, “It feels a little risky, because I don’t know if it’s going to work, but I’m writing a companion volume to A Visit From the Goon Squad,” at which point Choi gasped.
“I wouldn’t call it a sequel,” Egan continued. “A Visit From the Goon Squad leapt into the future, which was basically right now. So this one goes up to about 2034.…I’m following various characters, many of them in the generation that are still kids in Goon Squad, in their futures.”
A Visit From the Goon Squad, published in 2010, is a novel-in-stories that follows a cast of characters including fictional music executive Bennie Salazar. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
“I’m happy about a number of the parts,” Egan said of her current project. “But the big question—and this was a question I knew the answer to by this point with Goon Squad—was, can these things actually cohere in a way that makes the whole really a whole?…And that is not clear yet, so I have a lot of work ahead of me.”
Egan’s last novel, Manhattan Beach, was published in 2017.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
