Edan Lepucki

Edan Lepucki is a California novelist and essayist whose fiction often studies family bonds under social pressure. California, her 2014 debut novel from Little, Brown and Company, follows Cal and Frida after they abandon a crumbling Los Angeles for an isolated wilderness life. A pregnancy forces them to seek help from a guarded settlement whose promise of safety conceals its own rules and secrets. Lepucki uses the near-future setting less as technological spectacle than as a test of marriage, loyalty, trust, and the compromises communities demand from frightened people. The novel reached number three on the New York Times bestseller list and established her with a wide readership. Lepucki later wrote Woman No. 17 and Time’s Mouth, continuing her interest in California landscapes and difficult forms of belonging. Her training at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and work as a teacher and essayist also inform the novel’s careful attention to character within its larger dystopian frame.