A New York Times Bestseller Winner of the 2014 Kirkus Prize Winner of the 2014 New England Book Award for Fiction A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award A Best Book of the Year for: New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, Washington ...

King's Euphoria takes a traditional plot hook that we've seen attempted a lot at NUBClub - a love triangle - and makes it sing with realistic tensions, a fascinating setting, and genuine complexity in ethics at play in the relationships and the plot. Loosely based on the model of Margaret Mead, King's novel imagines its Mead-like character Nell Stone in New Guinea in a collaborative expedition with her current husband Fen and her new counterpart, the main narrator Bankson. Placing Bankson as the witness to the dysfunctional relationship between Nell and Fen gives us a good view of Nell's genius and strangeness. The book does a wonderful job of making anthropology interesting and offering us critically examine its practice. The rivalry between the characters as they observe the Tam culture exposes interesting questions of how we interpret other people's behavior, which King marries very nicely to the confusions and conflicts of the character's passions and misunderstandings. King's plot works well to keep these themes alive, having the Tam and the other people the anthropologists see get dominated, engage in opaque rituals, and war amongst themselves. The idea of the Grid also underpins the book, and we loved how that symbol begs the question of what measures can be used to classify people, and of course in a book about anthropology in the 21st century, it wouldn't be a complete system if we couldn't see the protagonists falling into the same 'primitive' emotions and dramas. Overall, we felt that King gave us a strong, passionate, and challenging work about professional success, romantic whim, and the competition between people, and we recommend this book highly to anyone who's interested in seeing a not-too-flattering view of the founders of anthropology.