Overview

It's okay for men to make bad art. There's no price on their head for doing it ... Nothing for men is pre-determined, except their chance at great success. Los Angeles, 1978. When Romy, a gifted young artist in the male-dominated art scene of 1970s California, dies in suspicious circumstances, it is not long before her art-star husband Billy finds a replacement. Paz, fresh out of art school in New York, returns to California to take her place. But she is haunted by Romy, who is everywhere: in the photos and notebooks and art strewn around the house, and in the eyes of the baby she left behind. As Paz attempts to claim her creative life, strange things begin to happen. Photographs move, noises reverberate through the house, people start to question what really happened the night Romy died, and then a postcard in her handwriting arrives. As Paz becomes increasingly obsessed with the woman she has replaced, a disturbing picture begins to emerge, driving her deep into the desert--the site of Romy's final artwork--to uncover the truth. At once an exquisite exploration of creativity and an atmospheric page-turner, Utopia is a book that takes hold of you and will leave you altered.

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9781957363134

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Reviews

"""Utopia is a marvel. Vividly beguiling on art, love, and what it means to be alive, every page thrums with magic."" --Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure ""Utopia is a bird's eye view of the desires of the human heart ... through characters who feel and live deeply at the boundaries of art and life. Sopinka's luminescent prose tackles the danger and vitality of artistic and bodily desire under the politically charged structures of masculine power ... with rawness, deep awareness, and razor-sharp critique ... This is an urgent book."" --Angélique Lalonde, author of Glorious Frazzled Beings ""These brilliant and bold artists explode off the page as they try to transcend the boundaries of the material world in their work. But the most dangerous waters they must navigate are those of the male-dominated world of the 1970s, which erases their art and identities. Sopinka explores the minefield that is loving men in an oppressively patriarchal world. And she captures the volatility and power of female friendships, and the uncharted maps of women's untameable artistic drives."" --Heather O'Neill, author of When We Lost Our Heads ""Utopia is interested in life as performance, in the ways that we attempt to transcend our own bodies, and in what it means to be a woman artist in a world that is run by and for men. Set against the backdrop of the arid California desert, full of scalding cups of diner coffee and burning tarmac highways, this is a book as seething as its parts."" --Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes ""With tense and glittering writing, Heidi Sopinka's Utopia blasts the dry desert sun onto the lives and afterlives of a circle of Californian artists, the women they are and the women they love. This is a thrilling book about artistic inheritance, jealousies, and affinities."" --Leanne Shapton, author of Guestbook and Swimming Studies ""Tense, sexy, and uncanny. Utopia shimmers with desert heat and burns with atmosphere. It's Rebecca meets Zabriskie Point. Luminous."" --Francesca Reece, author of Voyeur ""Utopia is a searing novel about art, ownership, and the entanglement of power and performance. Heidi Sopinka's sentences have a bluish-orange intensity, a captivating energy that conjures a desert at dusk."" --Makenna Goodman, author of The Shame ""Utopia is a study in contrasts: tart and poetic; sensitive and wild; bright and spooky like the LA light. It drove me onward; it let me linger. It made me angry; it inspired me. Above all, it clinches what we all suspected from The Dictionary of Animal Languages--Heidi Sopinka is a crazy good writer. I'd follow her anywhere."" --Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse ""I was transfixed by Heidi Sopinka's incandescent prose. It blazed through me and touched my heart in the deepest, most tender place. Utopia is about a powerful bond between mother and daughter; the collision of art, performance, and female friendships; and how grief shapes our ability to love and hope. Sexy, devastating, and wise--this novel will make you feel alive."" --Sanaë Lemoine, author of The Margot Affair ""Utopia cleverly investigates layers of social issues: feminism and its intersections with race and class; gender roles in life and in art; women's relationships; the artist's relationship to commerce and social justice ... [Sopinka] excels in characterization and the evocation of the power of creation."" --Shelf Awareness ""Sopinka's mesmerizing latest ... stages a story of obsession in the 1970s Los Angeles art world ... This page-turner doubles as a love letter to the daring women on the fringes of art history."" --Publishers Weekly ""Heidi Sopinka returns with flawless prose and aching atmosphere in this hypnotic exploration of art, power, ownership, and identity. Utopia solidifies Sopinka as an artist at the top of her game--unafraid to be equal parts tender and cutting in her musings on feminine relationships. This book is devastating in the most beautiful way possible."" --Laura Graveline, Brazos Bookstore ""In the male-dominated California art scene of the 1970s, Paz, an emerging young female artist, is haunted. Haunted by her new husband's dead wife, a rising artist who died suspiciously, leaving behind both a baby and a mystery. Haunted by her own impostor syndrome, after essentially inheriting someone else's life. Haunted by the men in control and the women she doesn't feel equal to. Moody, atmospheric, tense, feminist, and moving. I loved immersing myself in this unique world and quietly powerful novel."" --Seth Tucker, Carmichael's Bookstore ""This book opens with two parents leaving their baby in a dresser drawer at a gallerist's holiday party and gets that isn't even the most uncomfortable scene. Read if you like 1970s feminist critiques and female artists' unique and universal struggles"" --Ivory Owl Reviews ""Throughout, Sopinka's matter-of-fact, almost dead-pan, narration is juxtaposed with penetrating, dramatic dialogues. Her great strength is in recording how people strike off each other, then strike out at each other."" --Mark Thomas, The Canberra Times ""This is what you get if you steep de Maurier's, Rebecca in sex, drugs, and turpentine and stick it in the 1970s desert art world. Shimmering with sweat and rippling with obsession and grief (over people, art, obsolescence), the women in this book bristle against the collectivist art world and its misogyny, each of them trying to make their mark in radical performance art, each of them stifled by choices their own and not. In turns unsettling and violent, these characters reckon with their insecurities, both the internal failures of new motherhood and the external pressures to disappear and let the men in their lives thrive. Character-driven, with palpable rage and unbridled self-reflection, the narrative stews in themes and vibes."" --Epilogue Books Chocolate Brews Praise for The Dictionary of Animal Languages: ""The Dictionary of Animal Languages is such a special book, suffused with an almost painterly intelligence. Sopinka's characters experience the world with an intensity we associate with children and visionaries. Watching them navigate the difficulties of the humdrum and the glamorous both is a distinctive, if unsettling, pleasure."" --Rivka Galchen, author of American Innovations and Atmospheric Disturbances ""A stunning novel with quiet, prayerful prose to take your breath away. Sopinka flawlessly inhabits the rich inner world of her characters as if she could shed her own skin. Powerful in a soft way, like the static electricity before a storm."" --Laura Graveline, Brazos Bookstore, Houston, TX ""With stunning prose, lavish details, deep wisdom, and emotional precision, reading this book is like falling in love--my interest in everything else was lost."" --Claire Cameron, author of The Last Neanderthal ""Elements in the book build and shift, weaving together to create a vivid and powerfully human reckoning of a life, of aging and loss, of a century of conflict, and of the relationship between the natural and the industrial world."" --Toronto Star ""[Leonora Carrington's] life inspired Heidi Sopinka's debut novel, The Dictionary of Animal Languages."" --New York Times Style Magazine ""The legendary Leonora Carrington is reimagined as the reclusive, ninety year-old painter Ivory Frame, who is quietly at work at a dictionary of animal languages when she finds out that she has a granddaughter she didn't know of--a turn of events as disorientating as surrealism itself, as Ivory never actually had a child."" --Courtney Maum, Book Riot, ""12 Novels about Historical Women to Inspire a Better Future"" ""Made me push past my own expectations of literature."" --Nichole Perkins, The 2019 Tournament of Books ""[T]he language of Sopinka's Dictionary ... makes me feel I'm walking through lush dreamscapes from an art museum's walls."" --Rion Amilcar Scott, The 2019 Tournament of Books ""[R]ead it in two sittings, and completely enjoyed myself ... the depth to which I could slip into Ivory's point of view, the rhythms of her emotional responses, was a dealmaker for me. And the fact that the story's way of evincing feeling and thought felt more evoked than stated--there was just so much in this novel that held me."" --Rosecrans Baldwin, The 2019 Tournament of Books ""Sopinka isn't just a terrific writer, she's a great thinker. Her writing has particular sway and grace when she writes about the natural world."" --Christy Heron-Clark, The 2019 Tournament of Books ""Not only a dictionary of animal language, but also an atlas of the human heart, Heidi Sopinka's gorgeous debut novel maps the difficult territory between history and memory, love and loss."" --Johanna Skibsrud, author of The Sentimentalists ""A rich, painterly novel, a space where image and sound and the powers of the written word meet and mingle."" --Brixton Review of Books ""[T]ransfixing."" --AnOther Magazine ""The Dictionary of Animal Languages shifts between past and present, across beautifully-rendered landscapes and soundscapes. In the foreground in sharp focus, an inner world, the story of a woman's life, a life spent in rebellion from society, domesticity, and definition. Sensual and sensory, this is a story about the strength of the human spirit and it is about bodies, desire, and irrevocable loss, told in prose that is fresh, urgent and lyrical. A passionate and compelling debut."" --Anna Thomasson, author of A Curious Friendship ""[A] brilliant book."" --In The Moment ""Masterfully written in expressive prose, The Dictionary of Animal Languages is a tale of an artist's life outlining love and loss and the surprises, both good and bad, that were thrown in her path. It is full of keen observations which are almost meditative, perhaps an indication of the artist's ability to appreciate beauty and small details, especially in nature, which give continued meaning to life even when events turn tragic."" --Carina Mcnally, Irish Examiner ""[P]atient readers will find, as I did, that a bit of mystery about what exactly happened is just enough bait to keep them going until they've gotten to know Ivory so well that the last third or so of the book is emotionally devastating in the best way. This book is a powerful and brilliantly constructed story about loss, love, and communication of all types."" --Annie Smith, Utah Valley University Library, Edelweiss ""The writing is poetic and powerful ... the language is full of imagery and energy, active and fresh. Sopinka has her own grammar, using sentence fragments in moments of urgency."" --Tonstant Weader Reviews, five stars ""A beautifully odd book that needs and deserves time to seep into the reader's bones."" --Sunday Independent ""Tinged with horror, Utopia creates a terse and tightly wound artistic mystery."" --Cameron Woodhead, The Sydney Morning Herald ""This book opens with two parents leaving their baby in a dresser drawer at a gallerist's holiday party and gets that isn't even the most uncomfortable scene. Read if you like 1970s feminist critiques and female artists' unique and universal struggles."" --Ivory Owl Reviews"

Utopia is a marvel. Vividly beguiling on art, love, and what it means to be alive, every page thrums with magic. --Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure Utopia is a bird's eye view of the desires of the human heart ... through characters who feel and live deeply at the boundaries of art and life. Sopinka's luminescent prose tackles the danger and vitality of artistic and bodily desire under the politically charged structures of masculine power ... with rawness, deep awareness, and razor-sharp critique ... This is an urgent book. --Angelique Lalonde, author of Glorious Frazzled Beings These brilliant and bold artists explode off the page as they try to transcend the boundaries of the material world in their work. But the most dangerous waters they must navigate are those of the male-dominated world of the 1970s, which erases their art and identities. Sopinka explores the minefield that is loving men in an oppressively patriarchal world. And she captures the volatility and power of female friendships, and the uncharted maps of women's untameable artistic drives. --Heather O'Neill, author of When We Lost Our Heads Utopia is interested in life as performance, in the ways that we attempt to transcend our own bodies, and in what it means to be a woman artist in a world that is run by and for men. Set against the backdrop of the arid California desert, full of scalding cups of diner coffee and burning tarmac highways, this is a book as seething as its parts. --Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes With tense and glittering writing, Heidi Sopinka's Utopia blasts the dry desert sun onto the lives and afterlives of a circle of Californian artists, the women they are and the women they love. This is a thrilling book about artistic inheritance, jealousies, and affinities. --Leanne Shapton, author of Guestbook and Swimming Studies Tense, sexy, and uncanny. Utopia shimmers with desert heat and burns with atmosphere. It's Rebecca meets Zabriskie Point. Luminous. --Francesca Reece, author of Voyeur Utopia is a searing novel about art, ownership, and the entanglement of power and performance. Heidi Sopinka's sentences have a bluish-orange intensity, a captivating energy that conjures a desert at dusk. --Makenna Goodman, author of The Shame Utopia is a study in contrasts: tart and poetic; sensitive and wild; bright and spooky like the LA light. It drove me onward; it let me linger. It made me angry; it inspired me. Above all, it clinches what we all suspected from The Dictionary of Animal Languages -- Heidi Sopinka is a crazy good writer. I'd follow her anywhere. --Lauren Elkin, author of Flaneuse I was transfixed by Heidi Sopinka's incandescent prose. It blazed through me and touched my heart in the deepest, most tender place. Utopia is about a powerful bond between mother and daughter; the collision of art, performance, and female friendships; and how grief shapes our ability to love and hope. Sexy, devastating, and wise--this novel will make you feel alive. --Sanae Lemoine, author of The Margot Affair Utopia cleverly investigates layers of social issues: feminism and its intersections with race and class; gender roles in life and in art; women's relationships; the artist's relationship to commerce and social justice ... [Sopinka] excels in characterization and the evocation of the power of creation. --Shelf Awareness Sopinka's mesmerizing latest ... stages a story of obsession in the 1970s Los Angeles art world ... This page-turner doubles as a love letter to the daring women on the fringes of art history. --Publishers Weekly Praise for The Dictionary of Animal Languages: The Dictionary of Animal Languages is such a special book, suffused with an almost painterly intelligence. Sopinka's characters experience the world with an intensity we associate with children and visionaries. Watching them navigate the difficulties of the humdrum and the glamorous both is a distinctive, if unsettling, pleasure. --Rivka Galchen, author of American Innovations and Atmospheric Disturbances A stunning novel with quiet, prayerful prose to take your breath away. Sopinka flawlessly inhabits the rich inner world of her characters as if she could shed her own skin. Powerful in a soft way, like the static electricity before a storm. --Laura Graveline, Brazos Bookstore, Houston, TX With stunning prose, lavish details, deep wisdom, and emotional precision, reading this book is like falling in love--my interest in everything else was lost. --Claire Cameron, author of The Last Neanderthal Elements in the book build and shift, weaving together to create a vivid and powerfully human reckoning of a life, of aging and loss, of a century of conflict, and of the relationship between the natural and the industrial world. --Toronto Star [Leonora Carrington's] life inspired Heidi Sopinka's debut novel, The Dictionary of Animal Languages. --New York Times Style Magazine The legendary Leonora Carrington is reimagined as the reclusive, ninety year-old painter Ivory Frame, who is quietly at work at a dictionary of animal languages when she finds out that she has a granddaughter she didn't know of--a turn of events as disorientating as surrealism itself, as Ivory never actually had a child. --Courtney Maum, Book Riot, 12 Novels about Historical Women to Inspire a Better Future Made me push past my own expectations of literature. --Nichole Perkins, The 2019 Tournament of Books [T]he language of Sopinka's Dictionary ... makes me feel I'm walking through lush dreamscapes from an art museum's walls. --Rion Amilcar Scott, The 2019 Tournament of Books [R]ead it in two sittings, and completely enjoyed myself ... the depth to which I could slip into Ivory's point of view, the rhythms of her emotional responses, was a dealmaker for me. And the fact that the story's way of evincing feeling and thought felt more evoked than stated--there was just so much in this novel that held me. --Rosecrans Baldwin, The 2019 Tournament of Books Sopinka isn't just a terrific writer, she's a great thinker. Her writing has particular sway and grace when she writes about the natural world. --Christy Heron-Clark, The 2019 Tournament of Books Not only a dictionary of animal language, but also an atlas of the human heart, Heidi Sopinka's gorgeous debut novel maps the difficult territory between history and memory, love and loss. --Johanna Skibsrud, author of The Sentimentalists A rich, painterly novel, a space where image and sound and the powers of the written word meet and mingle. --Brixton Review of Books [T]ransfixing. --AnOther Magazine The Dictionary of Animal Languages shifts between past and present, across beautifully-rendered landscapes and soundscapes. In the foreground in sharp focus, an inner world, the story of a woman's life, a life spent in rebellion from society, domesticity, and definition. Sensual and sensory, this is a story about the strength of the human spirit and it is about bodies, desire, and irrevocable loss, told in prose that is fresh, urgent and lyrical. A passionate and compelling debut. --Anna Thomasson, author of A Curious Friendship [A] brilliant book. --In The Moment Masterfully written in expressive prose, The Dictionary of Animal Languages is a tale of an artist's life outlining love and loss and the surprises, both good and bad, that were thrown in her path. It is full of keen observations which are almost meditative, perhaps an indication of the artist's ability to appreciate beauty and small details, especially in nature, which give continued meaning to life even when events turn tragic. --Carina Mcnally, Irish Examiner [P]atient readers will find, as I did, that a bit of mystery about what exactly happened is just enough bait to keep them going until they've gotten to know Ivory so well that the last third or so of the book is emotionally devastating in the best way. This book is a powerful and brilliantly constructed story about loss, love, and communication of all types. --Annie Smith, Utah Valley University Library, Edelweiss The writing is poetic and powerful ... the language is full of imagery and energy, active and fresh. Sopinka has her own grammar, using sentence fragments in moments of urgency. --Tonstant Weader Reviews, five stars A beautifully odd book that needs and deserves time to seep into the reader's bones. --Sunday Independent

Utopia is a marvel. Vividly beguiling on art, love, and what it means to be alive, every page thrums with magic. --Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure Utopia is a bird's eye view of the desires of the human heart ... through characters who feel and live deeply at the boundaries of art and life. Sopinka's luminescent prose tackles the danger and vitality of artistic and bodily desire under the politically charged structures of masculine power ... with rawness, deep awareness, and razor-sharp critique ... This is an urgent book. --Angelique Lalonde, author of Glorious Frazzled Beings These brilliant and bold artists explode off the page as they try to transcend the boundaries of the material world in their work. But the most dangerous waters they must navigate are those of the male-dominated world of the 1970s, which erases their art and identities. Sopinka explores the minefield that is loving men in an oppressively patriarchal world. And she captures the volatility and power of female friendships, and the uncharted maps of women's untameable artistic drives. --Heather O'Neill, author of When We Lost Our Heads Praise for The Dictionary of Animal Languages: The Dictionary of Animal Languages is such a special book, suffused with an almost painterly intelligence. Sopinka's characters experience the world with an intensity we associate with children and visionaries. Watching them navigate the difficulties of the humdrum and the glamorous both is a distinctive, if unsettling, pleasure. --Rivka Galchen, author of American Innovations and Atmospheric Disturbances A stunning novel with quiet, prayerful prose to take your breath away. Sopinka flawlessly inhabits the rich inner world of her characters as if she could shed her own skin. Powerful in a soft way, like the static electricity before a storm. --Laura Graveline, Brazos Bookstore, Houston, TX With stunning prose, lavish details, deep wisdom, and emotional precision, reading this book is like falling in love--my interest in everything else was lost. --Claire Cameron, author of The Last Neanderthal Elements in the book build and shift, weaving together to create a vivid and powerfully human reckoning of a life, of aging and loss, of a century of conflict, and of the relationship between the natural and the industrial world. --Toronto Star [Leonora Carrington's] life inspired Heidi Sopinka's debut novel, The Dictionary of Animal Languages. --New York Times Style Magazine The legendary Leonora Carrington is reimagined as the reclusive, ninety year-old painter Ivory Frame, who is quietly at work at a dictionary of animal languages when she finds out that she has a granddaughter she didn't know of--a turn of events as disorientating as surrealism itself, as Ivory never actually had a child. --Courtney Maum, Book Riot, 12 Novels about Historical Women to Inspire a Better Future Made me push past my own expectations of literature. --Nichole Perkins, The 2019 Tournament of Books [T]he language of Sopinka's Dictionary ... makes me feel I'm walking through lush dreamscapes from an art museum's walls. --Rion Amilcar Scott, The 2019 Tournament of Books [R]ead it in two sittings, and completely enjoyed myself ... the depth to which I could slip into Ivory's point of view, the rhythms of her emotional responses, was a dealmaker for me. And the fact that the story's way of evincing feeling and thought felt more evoked than stated--there was just so much in this novel that held me. --Rosecrans Baldwin, The 2019 Tournament of Books Sopinka isn't just a terrific writer, she's a great thinker. Her writing has particular sway and grace when she writes about the natural world. --Christy Heron-Clark, The 2019 Tournament of Books Not only a dictionary of animal language, but also an atlas of the human heart, Heidi Sopinka's gorgeous debut novel maps the difficult territory between history and memory, love and loss. --Johanna Skibsrud, author of The Sentimentalists A rich, painterly novel, a space where image and sound and the powers of the written word meet and mingle. --Brixton Review of Books [T]ransfixing. --AnOther Magazine The Dictionary of Animal Languages shifts between past and present, across beautifully-rendered landscapes and soundscapes. In the foreground in sharp focus, an inner world, the story of a woman's life, a life spent in rebellion from society, domesticity, and definition. Sensual and sensory, this is a story about the strength of the human spirit and it is about bodies, desire, and irrevocable loss, told in prose that is fresh, urgent and lyrical. A passionate and compelling debut. --Anna Thomasson, author of A Curious Friendship [A] brilliant book. --In The Moment Masterfully written in expressive prose, The Dictionary of Animal Languages is a tale of an artist's life outlining love and loss and the surprises, both good and bad, that were thrown in her path. It is full of keen observations which are almost meditative, perhaps an indication of the artist's ability to appreciate beauty and small details, especially in nature, which give continued meaning to life even when events turn tragic. --Carina Mcnally, Irish Examiner [P]atient readers will find, as I did, that a bit of mystery about what exactly happened is just enough bait to keep them going until they've gotten to know Ivory so well that the last third or so of the book is emotionally devastating in the best way. This book is a powerful and brilliantly constructed story about loss, love, and communication of all types. --Annie Smith, Utah Valley University Library, Edelweiss The writing is poetic and powerful ... the language is full of imagery and energy, active and fresh. Sopinka has her own grammar, using sentence fragments in moments of urgency. --Tonstant Weader Reviews, five stars

Author Information

Heidi Sopinka is the author of The Dictionary of Animal Languages, which was shortlisted for the Kobo Writing Emerging Writer Prize, and longlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. A former environment columnist at The Globe and Mail, she is co-founder and co-designer at Horses Atelier. Her writing has won a national magazine award and has appeared in The Paris Review, The Believer, Brick, and Lit Hub, and has been anthologized in Art Essays. She lives in Toronto.

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