Sandra Newman

Sandra Newman was born in Boston in 1965 and studied at the Polytechnic of Central London and the University of East Anglia. She left the United States at seventeen and spent most of her adult life in England before settling in New York, a stretch she recounts in her 2010 memoir Changeling. She also co-wrote a guide to craft, How Not to Write a Novel.

Her novels keep putting societies under pressure to see what breaks. The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done (2002), her first, centres on a Guatemalan-born adoptee and earned a Guardian First Book Award nomination. The Country of Ice Cream Star (2014) sends a teenage narrator across a plague-ruined America, in a voice that bends English into a dialect of its own. The Men (2022) imagines every person with a Y chromosome vanishing overnight. Its premise sparked argument online, with some critics objecting that it sweeps in trans women, as Reason reported.

Recognition has followed the more ambitious books. Ice Cream Star was longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and The Heavens (2019) was a New York Times Notable Book. Julia (2023) was written with the approval of George Orwell's estate and retells Nineteen Eighty-Four through Winston Smith's lover. It was a finalist for France's Grand Prix de littérature américaine in 2024 and won the Kitschies' Red Tentacle Award.

If you arrived from 1984, start with her afterword in the 75th anniversary edition, then move to Julia, which reopens the same corridors and the same note slipped into Winston's hand. For something wholly her own, pick The Country of Ice Cream Star.