Lurkers

From the creator and director of Shirkers, the critically acclaimed 2018 Netflix documentary, and director of the forthcoming film adaptation of Elif Batuman's The Idiot, comes a new novel about a neighborhood of immigrants, seekers, lovers, and lurkers.

In a suburban L.A. neighborhood, a group of neighbors keep wary distance and at times collide, propelled by loneliness, desire, fury, and sorrow. Precocious Korean-American sisters Mira and Rosemary find their world rocked by a suicide; a charismatic and creepy drama teacher grooms his students; an aging gay horror novelist fights loneliness; and a white mother and her adopted Vietnamese daughter deal with lifelong anger issues. Spanning decades, and bringing together a diverse and interlocking group of stories, Lurkers is a Los Angeles masterpiece, reminiscent of films such as Magnolia and Short Cuts, and showing Sandi Tan as a practitioner of fiction as formidable and exciting as she is in her filmmaking.