Look at Me

Recently recovered from a catastrophic car accident, fashion model Charlotte Swenson returns to life in Manhattan. Her beautiful face conceals eighty titanium screws that hold together her shattered bones. Charlotte, now unrecognizable to those who knew her before the accident, begins to float invisibly away from her former life and into an ephemeral world of fashion nightclubs and Internet projects, where image and reality blur. “Look at Me” is both a satire of our image-obsessed times and a mystery of human identity. Jennifer Egan illuminates the difficulties of shaping an inner life in a culture preoccupied with surfaces and asks whether ‘truth’ can have any meaning in an era when reality itself has become a style.Written with a masterful intelligence and grace, “Look at Me” establishes Jennifer Egan as one of the most daring and gifted novelists of her generation. ‘The plot is a glorious and intricate mechanism, but it is Egan’s style that ignites the imagination. Her prose is balanced, evocative and beautiful. And her underlying interest in the nature of self, image and reality permeates this sardonic and forceful work’ – “Daily Telegraph”. ‘Bitingly intelligent satire on American celebrity culture’ – “Independent”. ‘A parody of the self-discovery novel, it’s an intelligent, gripping read about the manipulation of the individual’ – “Time Out”.