• Serpent's Tail
  • Published: 2nd August 2018
  • Agent: James Wills

The Future Won’t Be Long

Jarett Kobek

It’s the tail-end of 1986 and Baby is the freshest-faced, starriest-eyed young homo in all of New York City, straight off the bus from closeted backwoods Wisconsin. Adeline is his rich-art-school-kid saviour with a bizarre transatlantic drawl and a spare bed.

The Future Won’t Be Long follows Baby and Adeline as they cling to each other for dear life through a decade of mad, bad New York life punctuated by the deaths of Warhol, Basquiat and Wojnarowicz and the forcible gentrification of the East Village. While Adeline develops into the artist she never really expected to become, Baby falls into a twilight zone of clubbing, ketamine and late-capitalistic sexual excess. As he struggles to find his way out again, Baby will test the strength of a friendship that had seemed unbreakable.

Riotously funny, provocative but tender, The Future Won’t Be Long is a sprawling, ecstatic elegy to New York, and to the friendships that have the power to change – and save – our lives.

“This is New York in the late 80s and early 90s: a city of club kids, drag queens, artists and junkies; the urban laboratory where identities are being reinvented for the new millennium ... a novel that not only dissects with consummate skill the cultural life of fin-de-siècle New York, but finds there the early symptoms of our contemporary malignancy.”
The Observer
“A festival of wit and, finally, wisdom.”
The Spectator
“This succinct, surprising, infinitely self-knowing book is the Infinite Jest of the Twitter age ... it's vicious. It's a hoot.”
The Times

Other books by Jarett Kobek