This Is an Actual Tragedy (A Novel)

In this astonishing debut novel, four unlikely friends meet at the University of Chicago’s “Scholars of Color” program and form an unbreakable bond—until they’re drawn into a dangerous campus game that ends in catastrophe.

It’s the fall of 2013, and Darwin Harrington—a physics geek determined to level up his life—is on his way to orientation. Soon, he’ll meet the friends who will split and rearrange the atomic bonds of his existence. There’s Nat: an adrift, aspiring writer, who enters an illicit romance that’s all fun and games until it isn’t. Stephanie: the campus It Girl who’s guarding a secret that threatens to shatter her carefully-crafted sense of self. And Jordan: the golden boy, a six-foot-four basketball star who’s earned the nickname “Young Barack,” but struggles beneath the weight of expectations.

When Darwin receives an invitation to participate in the most notorious and nerdy secret society at school, revolving around an elaborate tradition called Scav—an unhinged scavenger hunt that requires students to perform absurd, often illegal, stunts—Nat, Stephanie, and Jordan roll their eyes. But over the next four years, as they navigate the widening gap between who they feel they really are versus how others perceive them, each of them will join the hunt for different reasons. One won’t live to see graduation.

Provocative, profound, and deeply, darkly funny, this marks the explosive arrival of a brilliant new voice in contemporary fiction, about the perils of trying to find yourself in a world that’s lost its way. Both a razor-sharp satire of college life and a sweeping coming-of-age story, This Is an Actual Tragedy asks: Who gets to play the game? And who suffers the consequences when the game goes awry?