The years immediately after college are sort of life’s purgatory. Some join the peace corps, some take a gap year in Europe, some hang around their college town, getting drunk with the same friend group and hiding temporarily from the next chapter in their lives. Brooklyn-based writer Andrea Bartz captures that aimless life phase expertly in “The Lost Night,” on sale now from Crown, along with the “themes of friendship, identity and obsession inside the close-knit world of deep-recession Bushwick.”
Lindsay Bach spent her post-grad limbo gathering nightly at a Bushwick loft complex, partying with a group of artists and hipsters through the height of the recession. The era ended overnight when her friends discovered Edie, the group’s vivacious ringleader, with a suicide note on her computer and a bullet in her head. Ten years later, an unsettling video forces Lindsay to ask if it was really suicide, and what role she might have played in Edie’s death.
Andrea Bartz is a journalist and essayist who’s worked for Glamour, Fit, Pregnancy, Psychology Today and others. She co-authored the blog and book “Stuff Hipsters Hate.” Her second novel, “The Herd” is forthcoming in 2020.