Unprecedented Times

Malavika Kannan establishes herself as an inimitable voice of Gen Z in this piercing coming-of-age debut novel.

Which comes first: experience or narrative? Rishi thinks she knows the answer as she arrives on campus for her first year at Stanford. A burnt-out youth climate activist, she used to want to save the world, but now she just wants to have gay sex. Her plan is set--she's going to leave behind the strict trappings of her Indian American childhood in Florida, study literature, experiment with love, and write all about it. Within a few months, she makes her first best friend, falls in love with her situationship, and promptly gets her heart broken.

What is not a part of Rishi's plan is the onset of the COVID pandemic. As the outside world becomes a terrifying place, she increasingly finds solace in the friendships she's made. Instead of virtual college, however, Rishi and her classmates join a farm collective, where their political discussions and growing disillusionment collide with sexual tension and responsibility. It's only when those relationships start fracturing under the stress of careless decisions, unrequited crushes, jealousies, and, yes, unprecedented times, that Rishi begins to question her own story.

Unprecedented Times captures the beauty, humor, pain, and straight-up chaos that exist in relationships between best friends and lovers, mothers and daughters, and between storytellers and themselves. Malavika Kannan's fresh, arresting novel is a testament to the power of self-narrative for Gen Z American women: of writing oneself into existence where no previous script exists.

Author: Malavika Kannan
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
Published: 08/18/2026
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.61lbs
Size: 8.26h x 5.44w x 0.86d
ISBN: 9781250420787


Review Citation(s):
Booklist 05/01/2026
Publishers Weekly 06/15/2026

About the Author
Malavika Kannan (b. 2001) is a Tamil American writer whose work appears in The Nation, The Washington Post, New York, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere. Her villain origin story is that, as a teenager in Florida, she organized for generational movements such as March for Our Lives and the Women's March. Her YA novel All the Yellow Suns was published in 2023. She graduated from Stanford University and now moonlights as a gay socialite in Brooklyn, where she co-hosts the popular mutual aid supper club Girls Eat Girls. You can follow her on Instagram @malavika.kannan and on TikTok @literarymal.