Brooklyn Bookbeat: acclaimed Brooklyn writer to release debut novel
This month, Brooklyn writer Kristopher Jansma is releasing his debut novel “TheUnchangeable Spots of Leopards” (Viking; On-sale: March 25, 2013). Already receiving high praise, Jansma’s book follows the worldwide travels of a deliberately unreliable narrator and his two friends: Julian McGann, a brilliant but troubled collegiate literary rival, and the high-society Broadway actress Evelyn, also known as the girl who got away.
Struggling to define themselves as individuals but inextricably bound together, the three chase love, success, and each other from jazz clubs in Manhattan to a writer’s colony in Iceland, from the mountains of Sri Lanka to a wedding on the lip of the Grand Canyon. After the trio has a disastrous falling out, the narrator weaves an intricate web of fiction around himself that allows him to dodge responsibility—but never fully escape it. It is only once he is able to put aside his fictions and confess his own role that he is set free.
As much a coming-of-age story about a young man and his friends trying to find their way in the world as an exploration of the nature of truth, “The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards” will appeal to readers of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and David Mitchell’s The Cloud Atlas, with its elegant study of the stories we tell to find out who we really are.