An exhilarating, hilarious, heartbreaking first novel about a woman under the spell of an eccentric new pen pal, an obsession that escalates into an acute episode of psychosis.

The narrator of Dear Charlie is 34.7 years old, of Jewish South African parentage, sleeping intermittently at the hospital where her mother is receiving cancer treatment, and contemplating the wreckage of her editorial career after a spectacular firing from a schmancy lifestyle magazine. In this state, she begins an exciting phone friendship with Charles Hunnewell Gaines: trustafarian, rent-free inhabitant of an illegal loft in Industry City, friend of contemporary art, sender of semi-erotic poems over text.

A wild journey, seen in part through the prism of the narrator’s texts to Charlie and the stories she divulges to perfect strangers, ensues—moving from New York City to Los Angeles, with flashbacks to Cape Town and the Tsitsikamma.

In a feat of stylistic brilliance, with a voice of wondrous originality, Gemma Sieff delivers a bold debut that unflinchingly confronts loss, limerence, addiction, privilege, race, and class. Dear Charlie blends high style with a knowing wink, and also, somehow, an innocence. It is funny and sad, fierce and tender—a stunning novel filled with all of life’s turbulent joy and sorrow.