AVA DELLAIRA
Author of Love Letters to the Dead, In Search of Us
and Exposure
One night, two people, four sides of a story.
In 2004, Juliette Marker, a white college freshman, and Noah King, a Black high school senior, are two lonely souls who enter each other’s orbit, forge a connection, and, after a chance meeting, go home together.
Twelve years later, Noah has done the impossible and made it in Hollywood. His first film is about to be released, and he and his beloved wife Jesse, a successful writer herself, have just had a baby. Meanwhile, Juliette’s best friend Annie is back in LA for the first time in more than a decade. As teenagers, Juliette and Annie shared an enviable bond, memorialized by Juliette’s mother, Margot, a renowned photographer. As Annie returns to the Topanga Canyon home where they spent their idyllic adolescence, she makes a startling discovery about Juliette that will threaten to blow up the life Noah has struggled to build.
Spanning decades, from LA to Chicago, and told through Annie, Juliette, Noah, and Jesse’s perspectives, this powerful, provocative novel delves into one life-changing night and the complex lives and relationships of those affected by it, exploring how race, artistic ambition, and grief expose different versions of the same story.
“This searingly aching novel defies all expectations: it is a bildungsroman, a meditation on friendship and artistic ambition, and an unflinching confrontation with the unreliability of memory and of truth. Dellaira has done the impossible; she has captured our era’s messy murky unknowing heart and done so with immense compassion and uncompromising verve and vaulted herself in the process into the top ranks of our literary culture.”
―Junot Díaz, author of This Is How You Lose Her
"Exposure pulses with electricity and grips you from page one. Dellaira perfectly captures how a singular moment in time can reverberate and change lives forever. In a thoughtful exploration of race and the pursuit of ambition, this exquisite novel illustrates how messy and elusive truth can be, blurring the lines between bad and good."
―Nancy Johnson, author of The Kindest Lie
“Ava Dellaira’s Exposure is a compelling story of ambition, becoming, grief, and desire. Mysterious, haunting, and seductive."
―Sanjena Sathian, author of Gold Diggers
"At turns tender and blistering, Exposure is a gripping story about youth, race, ambition, friendship and love, cut through with the sharp knife of grief. A story of artists in the making as well as the slippery nature of truth and memory, Exposure reveals 'how more than one thing can be true in the same breath.' Masterful.”
―Daisy Alpert Florin, author of My Last Innocent Year
“Exposure gracefully probes the ways the past can reach into the present and test everything we thought we knew about ourselves and those we hold close. Ava Dellaira has given us an empathetic exploration of creative ambition, grief, race, friendship, and ultimately, the strength and elasticity of love in all of its many forms. A captivating and beautifully crafted story.”
―Caitlin Mullen, author of Please See Us
"In Exposure, Dellaira explores challenging topics with a deft and unflinching gaze. The writing is sensuous, the settings sing, and the characters are complex and devastatingly real. Exposure examines grief, love, creativity, and truth, exploring the nuances and paradoxes that exist in each. A timely and profound novel.”
―Katie Bishop, author of The Girls of Summer
“Ava Dellaira is a courageous and deeply empathetic author, writing with abundant control about the issues with the highest stakes: hopes, dreams, and ambition; the open wounds of grief and injustice. This novel is full of surprises, with comfort unearthed in the most unexpected places, and it explores the ways that the most unimaginable heartbreaks can metamorphose into sources of connection...”
―Sarah Blakley-Cartwright, author of Alice Sadie Celine
“Dellaira explores gender and racial power dynamics in her gripping debut . . . Readers of Celeste Ng should take note.”
―Publishers Weekly
“Creatively crafted and will captivate readers . . . Dellaira’s penetrating exploration of loss, race, artistic ambition, and truth and the complex views shared by various perspectives make for a promising adult debut.”
―Booklist