BOOKS
BY SITA BALANI
BLACK WAVE
FICTION
Michelle Tea
Michelle Tea’s latest novel starts on familiar ground. The narrator, Michelle, is a broke, queer, barely employed writer in 90s San Francisco spending long nights getting drunk, taking drugs, screwing around and screwing up. But as the Mission district gentrifies around her, the city starts to lose its appeal. She tests the patience of her housemates, friends and lovers with her unstoppable thirst for sex, heroin and bad decisions, in a series of vignettes that will have you howling with laughter. Finally, Michelle decides it’s time to move on. When she moves to LA, the story takes an inspired and unexpected twist: it’s not just the end of the 90s, it’s the end of the world. Black Wave is a funny, inventive and sometimes sobering take on the apocalypse, and the most surprising queer novel of 2017.