Wholly contemporary and compulsively readable, this sparkling debut is a finely honed tale of sex, love, and making movies that is sure to appeal to fans of Nick Hornby and Melissa Bank.

Sparkle Life is about the movie business, sex, globalization, and real estate as told through the lives of three women in their 30s—Liv, Joy, and Sara. Liv is rich, talented, and promiscuous, tremendously attached to the men who raised her: her father, a very religious clothing manufacturer and her uncle, a Park Avenue psychiatrist. Joy makes lists: be a producer, married, and rich. Sara is extraordinarily observant, seeing details and identifying patterns, including her own inability to explain what the patterns mean.

Kara Lindstrom masterfully portrays a world where glitz, ambition, and sex are exposed to the seams. Yet, when her characters catch themselves in the compromises they live by, this racy tale is transformed into an incisive meditation on the challenges of everyday life.

“What a dazzler of a book! A group of interconnected and indelibly complex characters, all swirling around the maelstrom of the movies and the affairs of the heart, told in prose that snaps and glints and virtually sets off sparks. Lindstrom's going places and I'm buying a map because after this book, I’d follow her anywhere.”

—Caroline Leavitt, author of Girls in Trouble and Coming Back to Me

“Sparkle Life is exactly what a contemporary novel ought to be: sharp, funny, sad, and true. Lindstrom writes with a lucid asperity that suggests a Mary McCarthy narrator trapped in a Don DeLillo world.”

—Rachel Cline, author of What to Keep