Angela Sloan

A witty and delicious comedy of stoic girls, broken men, and mean hippies in the Nixon era—featuring the most engaging girl hero literature has seen this side of Harper Lee—from an acclaimed chronicler of the down-and-out.

Angela Sloan is the fourteen-year-old daughter of a retired CIA officer. Like other girls in D.C. in 1972, she shops at Sears and Roebuck, reads Black Beauty, and spends her afternoons watching Let’s Make a Deal while Washington is flooded with freaks, terrorists, and tourists. But everything changes for Angela one day when her father leaves her the keys to his Plymouth Scamp, a few sequentially numbered $100s, and the order to wait for his instructions. Angela Sloan is her “truthful and explicit” account of everything that happened while she waited.

Though she tries to stay on the down low, strangers keep finding her. An undercover poet has some lines he wants Angela to hear. A Chinese waitress won’t get out of the car Angela barely knows how to drive. A colleague of her father’s knows more than he is telling. And a glamorous, world-weary lady spy is giving out free advice and roadside assistance—unsolicited. Four parts Pynchon mixed with one part Lipsyte and a dash of Shteyngart, Angela Sloan is a lighthearted tragedy of underage driving, diner food, and homegrown terrorists—and the breakout for the universally acclaimed Whorton.