New Waves

Kevin Nguyen’s debut novel, New Waves, is a dive into the culture of tech start-ups and privacy on the internet. But it’s also the story of two friends, Margo and Lucas, and of what it means when a best friend is the love of your life. At the start of the novel, Margo — tired of being the only Black woman in super white spaces — convinces Lucas, who is Chinese and Vietnamese, to steal data from their company. Then, Margo and Lucas move to a new start-up (Margo, a brilliant programmer, makes hiring Lucas a condition of her employment), and months later, Margo dies in a car accident. That whole plot I just described happens within the first few chapters; the bulk of New Waves is Lucas understanding his grief, and what Margo left behind. What I found so compelling about New Waves was this friendship love story at the heart of the novel — and how Nguyen deftly addressed ideas of privacy in the age of the Internet, and what that all means.

“ I'd always wanted to write a novel about grief and how funny it is. You know, a lot of books about grief obviously are very bleak, and then they're hard to read. And they're kind of a bummer, which is certainly part of the experience — but there's something about grief that is actually very funny and makes people do funny, selfish things,” Nguyen said in an interview with NPR. “My best friend died when we were both 20, and I just had this really distinct memory. Obviously, you know, it was devastating. But me and our closest friends, after we learned the news, we showed up to the old Quiznos that we all used to hang out in, and we just started laughing. And I just, like, tried to take that energy and — that weird, like, unexplainable energy — and put that into a work of fiction.”

Rating: ★★★★★

Get it here: https://amzn.to/3bwdc92 or find it at your local indie (pls) here: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781984855237