For readers of Liz Moore and Shari Lapena, a luminous literary thriller about the price we pay for fame and the extraordinary lengths we’ll go to escape it

On an ordinary winter afternoon, impossibly glamorous political wife Laura Barnett gathers her passport and cash, lights her kitchen on fire, and vanishes.

Laura’s escape ignites a media frenzy — soon she is hotly pursued by a group of devoted superfans tracking her movements using a social media network dedicated to her disappearance. They call themselves the Following.

Meanwhile, relying on charm, bribes, and friends who might also be enemies, Laura drifts from Spain, through Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, and lastly Sierra Leone as she attempts to slip from the public’s gaze. Traveling south by yacht, bus, and dusty poda poda while finding companionship and beauty in the deserts, beaches, and border towns of North and West Africa, Laura transforms while her past falls further and further behind — but her Following refuses to relinquish their pursuit.

With gripping and clear-eyed prose, The Following details Laura’s fraught marriage in the public eye, her cross-continental escape, and the compulsion to follow a woman who is both revered and infamous, and refuses to be found. Part thriller and part cultural commentary, The Following is a harrowing, urgent novel examining the price of surveillance and public scrutiny, the cultural and societal differences between the Global North and South, and the way 21st-century fame — both invited and uninvited — poisons our most intimate relationships.