Janey Tracey
Janey Tracey graduated from the MFA program in fiction at Columbia University, where she taught undergraduate writing. Her writing has been published in CRAFT, Fiction, Entertainment Weekly, and others. She has worked many strange jobs, including writing for a UFO website and pretending to be a chatbot for a networking app. She lives in Queens, NY. True Believer is her first novel.
True Believer
After a traumatic breakup, a young woman goes to a UFO convention and has a break with reality.
Alison is having an awakening. After leaving her longtime boyfriend and moving across the country to work for a UFO website (despite being a firm nonbeliever), she expected to feel grief. Instead, she’s euphoric, if a little untethered. Giddy in her new solitary New York life, she compulsively fantasizes about every phallic object in her eyeline: strangers on the sidewalk; her married boss, Liam; the occasional letter opener. When she and her coworkers travel to Roswell, New Mexico, for the annual UFO festival, she finds herself unreasonably consumed by thoughts of Derek, the son of an infamous abductee.
As Alison’s flirtation with Derek takes her deeper into the UFO community, she’s unnerved by her growing affection for the strange people she meets, from a man styling himself as a Cowboy Alien Hunter to an abductee who makes surprisingly gorgeous alien sex paintings. When, to get a scoop for her job, she moonlights as an experiencer in a support group run by a New Age guru, she’s surprised at how much sense the program begins to make. Newly porous and reeling from the perspective all this new distance from her old life has given her, Alison increasingly experiences a blurring of the lines between reality and the extraordinary.
Advance praise for TRUE BELIEVER:
"Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and Alison, the heroine of Janey Tracey's True Believer, careens between them like a spaceship knocked off course. Tracey probes humanity's fixation on UFOs, alien sightings, and all things extraterrestrial with acerbic wit and a devastating eye for detail. Delightfully weird and delectably unhinged, this book will transport you to where no (wo)man has gone before." - Ariel Courage, author of BAD NATURE
"True Believer is the epitome of a great comic novel. Hilarious, unflinchingly honest, nonconformist, and intimate. The search for self-discovery in tandem with the belief in extra-terrestrial life forms converge in myriad forms of love. Janey Tracey writes with a sharp eye, a quick wit, and a huge heart. This is a book to read, relish, and undoubtedly recommend to friends and strangers alike." - Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of RABBITS for FOOD and COUNTING BACKWARDS
Publication
US: Harper Collins (Mariner)
Release date: 13 July 2027
