Hunters and Gatherers

The New York Timesbestselling author takes on New Agers as one woman searches for meaning in this brilliantly satiric but . . . sweet-natured novel (Publishers Weekly). Thirty-year-old Martha is stagnating in a demeaning, woefully underpaid job as a fact-checker at frothy fashion magazine Mode and an unhappy relationship with an unrepentant jerk. But she stumbles upon an unlikely new circle of friends when she interrupts a goddess-worshipping ceremony on Fire Island and ends up rescuing its accident-prone leader, Isis Moonwagon, from the waves. From the steel skyscrapers of Manhattan to a sweat lodge in the Arizona desert, Martha chases fulfillment and self-actualization in the company of this group of opinionated, bumbling women, but the revelations she receives are not necessarily what she expected. Proses satiric vision could not be more sharply focused here, and her powers of observation and deadpan humor never falter as she sends up the New Age movement and its over-earnest adherents (The Miami Herald).