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  • Published: 7 June 2025
  • ISBN: 9781405946155
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 400
Categories:

American Fantasy



Below Deck meets Romantic Comedy in this irresistible story about what happens when your teenage fantasy comes true in your adult years by the bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow.

Annie is:

  • On a cruise with her one-time favourite boyband and a thousand female super-fans
  • Still reeling from her divorce
  • Being replaced at work by her intern

Keith is:
  • Fifty years old and in a band that performs dance routines with hip thrusts
  • Suffering from sea sickness
  • Certain his wife doesn’t love him anymore

When a meet-and-greet throws them together, Annie develops a crush on Keith, and Keith starts to wonder if life might have a few surprises in store for him.

But are Keith and Annie just living a fantasy? And what happens when they get back to shore?

  • Published: 7 June 2025
  • ISBN: 9781405946155
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 400
Categories:

About the author

Emma Straub

Emma Straub is the New York Times bestselling author of four novels, The Vacationers, Modern Lovers, Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures, All Adults Here and the short story collection Other People We Married. Her books have been published in twenty countries. She and her husband own Books Are Magic, an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, New York.

Also by Emma Straub

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Praise for American Fantasy

A gorgeous and witty storyteller

Elizabeth Gilbert

Funny, poignant and beautifully observed

Jojo Moyes on THE VACATIONERS

Straub writes beautifully and amusingly . . . hard to beat for sheer charm and gentle wit

Daily Mail

Hugely talented . . . intelligent holiday reading

Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4

Straub writes with such verve and sympathetic understanding of her characters . . . Reading this novel has all the pleasures of reading one of Anne Tyler's compelling family portraits

New York Times

A funny and insightful look at love and relationships

Good Housekeeping

Emma Straub [is] the queen of the smart-girl summer read

Entertainment Weekly

Come for the nostalgia, stay for the tenderness

Elle

Emma Straub is most famous for her wry, warm novels exploring how our relationships shape, delight, wound, and, ultimately, sustain us

Oprah Daily

It’s Straub, so you know it’s going to be funny, touching, and filled with family drama.

Glamour

A totally engaging and smart book about the absolutely marvelous messiness of what makes up family; a wonderful book.

Elizabeth Strout on ALL ADULTS HERE

Straub has a gift for exposing larger truths through small, telling details. Her warmth and sense of humor electrify every page.

New York Magazine

American Fantasy is such a fun, delicious, big-hearted book.

Taylor Jenkins Reid

I can hardly remember the last time I read anything that brought me such pure joy. I was up too late reading, then got up too early to go back to reading. All I wanted was American Fantasy. It brims with truth and humanity and insight, and it made me snort like a pig. I loved it. I think the entire country will love it.

Ann Patchett

A delicious novel about being a grown-up girl who once loved something very, very much. You don't have to be a fan of something to love American Fantasy, but if you've ever truly devoted yourself to a boy band or a TV show or even a series of books, you will feel so understood by this novel.

Rainbow Rowell

Emma Straub is the most empathetic and open-hearted writer in literature. It is pure joy to see her turn to the emotionally complicated territory of teenage nostalgia and what it means to reconnect with the feelings of youth from the realities of middle age. In American Fantasy Straub uncovers the beauty and regret of reconciling who we once were with who we are now.

Kevin Wilson

Wow, who knew that what my life was missing was a book about boats and boybands?! This is a treasure chest of a story, filled with Straub’s signature warmth, humour, compassion and insight. I rooted for these characters and worried about them, and by the end, much like the Talkers, I was completely swept away by my love for them. An unmitigated pleasure from start to finish. I did not want to return to dry land!

Coco Mellors