The Nobodies Album by Parkhurst ’92 is an Unconventional Mystery

Carolyn Parkhurst ’92 made a huge splash on the literary scene with her first best-selling novel The Dogs of Babel. She has just published her third novel, The Nobodies Album, and it has already received several positive reviews in such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly as well as on NPR.

The protagonist of the novel is Octavia Frost, a famous best-selling novelist who is also known to be unpleasant. As she is about to deliver her latest manuscript to her New York publisher, she finds out her rock star son Milo has been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend. The book presents the chapters of Frost’s latest book and it also takes her on a journey in San Francisco to find clues about the crime.

In his Washington Post review, Art Taylor writes that The Nobodies Album is “not just a book about a novelist in action, it’s also a meditation on writing itself and on the curious intersections between the imagined world and the real one. … the book succeeds in probing nuanced issues of guilt and innocence through an intricate collage of memories and musings.”

In her survey of summer crime novels for NPR, Maureen Corigan writes: “The great pleasure of reading The Nobodies Album arises out of keeping track of the constantly shifting relationships among a small group of paranoid people quarantined from the rest of society by their fame.”