A bold novel about ambition, grief, creativity, beauty, and existential emptiness that retraces the arc of American life and culture in the first decades of the 21st century.

It is early 2017 in New York City, Donald Trump is President, and Solomon Fields, a young Jewish journalist-turned-advertising hack, finds himself disillusioned by the hollowness and conformity of American life and language. Once brimming with dreams and ideals instilled in him by his eternally bohemian grandmother, a survivor of the Holocaust who has dedicated her life to passion and pleasure, Sol now finds the senseless jargon he produces at work seeping into all aspects of the world around him—and most disturbingly, into the art that his beloved grandmother taught him to revere.

A personal tragedy drives Sol to leave New York and accept an invitation to The Coded Garden, an artists’ colony on a tropical island, whose mysterious patron, Sebastian Light, seems to offer the very escape Sol desperately needs. But the longer he remains in the Garden, the more Light comes to resemble Trump himself, and the games he plays with Sol become more dangerous. Slowly lines begin to blur—between reality and performance, sincerity and manipulation, art and life, beauty and emptiness—until Sol finds that he must question everything: his past, his convictions, and his very sanity.

“Alexander Maksik is a sorcerer of the first order."
—Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

Alexander Maksik
Alexander Maksik is the author of You Deserve Nothing, a New York Times and IndieBound bestseller; A Marker to Measure Drift, which was a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a finalist for the William Saroyan Prize and Le Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, and the basis of the 2023 motion picture Drift; Shelter in Place, named one of the best books of the year by the Guardian and the San Francisco Chronicle; and The Long Corner, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and named one of the best books of the year by The Australian. Maksik is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and The Sewanee Review’s Andrew Lytle Prize. His books have been translated into a dozen languages.

• May 17 2022
  “Eerie and moving.”
  — The New York Times Book Review
• May 16 2022
  “You won’t be able to keep your thoughts to yourself.”
  — Little Village Magazine
• May 16 2022
  “It’s a hard book to put down.”
  — Jewish Book Council
• Mar 7 2022
  “A triumph.”
  — Forward
• Feb 18 2022
  “A scathing satire.”
  — Publishers Weekly