Agnes Maurer has a plan. Before tomorrow’s spin class, she will find someone willing to kill her.

New York City, 2014: a place of gleaming towers, boutique fitness, designer handbags and, of course, existential despair. As Agnes wipes away the sweat from her early-morning SoulCycle she resolves that before her next lesson she will find someone happy to murder her.

Over the course of the following twenty-four hours, as she moves from apartment to office, from bar to rave, she scrolls from one contender to the next: an ice-cold magazine editor, a gun dealer found online, an older politician she dated as a teen, her cruel novelist boyfriend. As she does so, a portrait emerges from the loops and spools of her thought: of a place between beauty and rot, of a time between confidence and collapse, and of a woman between desire and destruction.

Written in exhilarating, hilarious, shocking prose, Agnes Lives! is an extraordinary debut novel from one of the most exciting new writers at work today, detailing everything chic, everything sexy and everything terrifyingly, crushingly depraved about a culture totally hung up on the image.

'An astonishing debut as mesmerizing as it is unnerving.' Joyce Carol Oates

'A tale of suspense, a statement, a cry for help, and a delicious tour-de-force.' Nell Zink

© Hallie Elizabeth Newton 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026