Side Effects

Guernica World Editions (World Prose)

9781771835503

290 pages | October 1, 2020

Any novel that starts off with the protagonists standing on a precipice overlooking the Bay Area and screaming for joy that they had found Mecca is a book I want to read. So will you. Side Effects is a deftly rendered, stream-of-consciousness narrative that provokes, challenges, and unsettles—a disquieting discourse cued to our time and place.

Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, Pomona College

Following WW II, hope was in the air. Fascism and the Great Depression were vanquished. Young Americans dreamed of a new world of peace and endless prosperity. Montana Katz’s new novel Side Effects chronicles the unravelling of those dreams through the lens of one autistic young woman. But Side Effects goes way beyond your traditional coming of age story. Like Katz’s earlier novel, Clytemnestra’s Last Day, which reimagined classic Greek myths to explore painful issues of sexual violence and human tragedy, Side Effects blows up the traditional coming of age story to explore the unravelling of one family and the creation of a global environmental catastrophe. Side Effects is a poignant story of the toxic forces that have destroyed both the American dream and the global environment. Great writing and political fiction at its best.

• Audio Excerpt
• Montana Katz’s new novel considers human self-destructiveness
• Montana Katz's #GuernicaVirtualLaunch