The Following: A Novel

A sweeping political novel about the price women pay for fame, happiness, and autonomy, in a tumultuous world that seeks to destroy them

On an ordinary winter afternoon, impossibly glamorous political wife Laura Barnett gathers her passport and cash, lights her kitchen on fire, and vanishes. Laura’s escape ignites a media frenzy — soon she is hotly pursued by a group of devoted superfans tracking her movements using a social media network dedicated to her disappearance. They call themselves the Following.

Meanwhile, Laura drifts from Spain, through Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, and lastly Sierra Leone as she attempts to slip from the public’s gaze, all the while navigating conflict zones and contending with her visible privilege. Traveling south by yacht, bus, and dusty poda poda while finding friends and enemies in the deserts, beaches, and border towns of North and West Africa, Laura transforms into a woman whose survival depends on her cunning and charm, and whose motives are deeply contrary to the good wife past she has left behind. But still her Following refuses to relinquish their pursuit.

With gripping and clear-eyed prose, The Following details Laura’s fraught marriage in the public eye, her cross-continental escape, and the collective compulsion to follow a woman who is both revered and infamous, and refuses to be found. The Following is a harrowing, urgent novel examining the cost contemporary women pay for true freedom, the cultural and societal differences between the Global North and South, and the way 21st-century fame — both invited and uninvited — poisons our most intimate relationships.