Fan approved: pre-order One’s Company now!

From WW Norton, Ashley Hutson’s debut novel One’s Company is a bizarre and profound novel following Bonnie Lincoln, a recent lottery winner who is determined to escape her childhood and recent traumas by moving to the mountains…to build a replica of the set of the 70s sitcom Three’s Company and live out the rest of her days as each character from the show in an attempt to shed her former self. All goes according to plan until one day, a visitor shows up on the premises and begins to unravel Bonnie’s self-contained delusion.

Is the premise of this novel outlandish? Absolutely—but Hutson is dedicated to the proposition, making the world-building (delusion-building?) some of the best I’ve read. With such intricate attention to Bonnie’s imagination, obsession, and paranoia, the pay-off is grand: One’s Company is both a hilarious read and a take on the volatility of an obsessive imagination and the impossibility of transcending the self through escapism.

Hutson’s writing is casual and deadpan with glints of a poetic profundity, reminding me a lot of Kristen Arnett’s style in Mostly Dead Things. As the blog post title suggests, fans of the so-called “Unhinged girlie” genre will definitely gravitate towards this book (I myself love books of this ilk, though I do try and resist reducing these novels with this label!).

What sets this book a part from other books with 'unhinged’ women protagonists is towards the end, we see a soft glimmer of hope for Bonnie. To be sure, One’s Company is a dark and intense novel, but by the end, Bonnie’s penchant self-annihilating reliance on imagination start to unravel and we see in the horizon, a chance for her to confront her traumas and reintegrate herself.

One’s Company by Ashley Hutson is available on June 14, 2022—preorder now. Thanks to WW Norton and NetGalley for the ARC!

Trigger warnings: Mention of SA; Death; Grief