Girlfriend on Mars: A Novel

by Deborah Willis

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A hilarious debut about people competing for a chance to join MarsNow — a reality TV show about the first manned mission to Mars. Girlfriend on Mars is a pitch-perfect send up of gazillionaire-funded space exploration, while also delving deep into humanity's final frontier: love.

Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize • One of Scientific American's Best Staff Reads of 2023

A funny, poignant, and page-turning debut novel that skewers billionaire-funded space travel in a love story of interplanetary proportions.

Amber Kivinen is moving to Mars. Or at least, she will be if she wins a chance to join MarsNow. She and twenty-three reality TV contestants from around the world—including attractive Israeli soldier Adam, endearing fellow Canadian Pichu, and an assortment of science nerds and wannabe influencers—are competing for two seats on the first human-led mission to Mars, sponsored by billionaire Geoff Task.

Meanwhile Kevin, Amber’s boyfriend of fourteen years, was content going nowhere until Amber left him—and their hydroponic weed business—behind. As he tends to (and smokes) the plants growing in their absurdly overpriced Vancouver basement apartment, Kevin tunes in to find out why the love of his life is so determined to leave the planet with somebody else. On screen, Amber competes in globe-trotting, Survivor-meets-Star Trek challenges and seems like she might be falling for Adam. But is that real, or is it just a tactic to keep from being voted off? And since the technology to come home doesn’t exist yet, would Amber really leave everything behind to be a billionaire’s Martian guinea pig? Sure, the rainforest is burning, Geoff Task has bought New Zealand, and Kevin might be a little depressed, but isn’t there some hope left for life on Earth?

An audacious debut from "a dazzlingly smart and strikingly original writer" (Molly Antopol), Girlfriend on Mars is at once a satirical indictment of our pursuit of fame and wealth amidst environmental crisis, and an exploration of humanity’s deepest longing, greatest quest, and most enduring cliché: love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393285918
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/13/2023
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	61,851
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Deborah Willis is the author of Girlfriend on Mars and two acclaimed collections of short stories, including The Dark and Other Love Stories. Her work has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Walrus, and Zoetrope, among other publications. She lives in Calgary, Canada.

Editorial Reviews

05/08/2023

Willis braids reality television and the climate crisis with billionaire-sponsored space travel in her breezy speculative debut. Amber Kivinen and Kevin Watkins, both 31, have been dating since they were teens, and they now run a marijuana-growing business out of their Vancouver apartment. In Kevin’s view, they’ve “committed to going nowhere,” so he’s surprised when Amber decides to participate in a reality television program, “a Survivor-meets-Star Trek amalgam,” where two winners will be rocketed to Mars. Amber’s facility with hydroponics makes her well suited for the MarsNow mission, the brainchild of billionaire Geoff Task, a combination Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, whom Kevin describes as “slim and pale, with a regal neck only a guillotine could love.” As Amber advances further in the competition she begins to fall for hunky Adam, who, as the child of Orthodox Jewish settlers in the West Bank, can relate to Amber’s conservative Christian upbringing. Kevin, likewise, begins a fledgling relationship with the couple’s friend Bronwyn, a white woman who wears her hair in dreadlocks. Willis keeps up a light tone and a fast pace even while getting deep into the science behind the Mars voyage, and her satire yields plenty of clever insights on celebrity culture. Readers are in for a treat. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Both satirical and sobering, Willis’s gimlet-eyed debut spares no one, skewering both apathy and misplaced ambition while keeping the pages turning at a furious pace."

Booklist (starred review)

"A sharp, funny take on capitalism, climate change, and our lifelong mission to be loved."

People

05/01/2023

DEBUT In Willis's first novel, Kevin Watkins is in love with his girlfriend Amber Kivinen, whom he's been with since high school. He believes she feels the same contentedness that he does, but their relationship starts to stagnate, and Amber begins to stray emotionally and physically. Her discontent leads her to secretly apply to be on a new reality TV show called MarsNow. Readers are launched into the fabricated world of reality TV in chapters narrated by Amber, while chapters narrated by Kevin reveal his rapidly constricting world, as he has decided not to leave the house unless Amber gets kicked off the show. The alternating chapters slowly reveal the backgrounds and motivations of both Kevin and Amber (Willis doesn't shy away from showing their uglier sides but keeps them sympathetic); meanwhile the narrative perfectly skewers reality TV shows. VERDICT A fresh take on the break-up narrative, mixed with the existential angst of today's world. Willis (author of two short story collections, including The Dark and Other Love Stories) explores many subthemes that will ring true, particularly for millennial readers.—Kristen Stewart

Library Journal

2023-04-11
Amber Kivinen is going to Mars! She just has to win a game show first.

Amber and Kevin Watkins have known each other since second grade and have been going out since they were 17. When they left their hometown of Thunder Bay, Ontario, to move to Vancouver, it was supposed to be for brighter horizons—an escape from their oppressive home lives and a chance to pursue their dreams. Ten years later, those dreams seem to have stalled out. Kevin’s ambition to be a screenwriter only lasted one semester in film school, and in spite of her master’s degree in environmental science, Amber is working as a receptionist. To supplement their incomes Amber and Kevin also run a small-scale hydroponic marijuana farm out of their basement apartment and, inevitably, partake fairly heavily of their product. For Kevin this life seems an ideal fit; he is perfectly content to go nowhere as long as he and Amber are “going nowhere together.” Amber, however, who was on track to become an Olympic gymnast before a shoulder injury sidelined her, has nowhere to channel the energy that propelled her to athletic greatness except into a cycle of self-destructive flirtations. That is, until she hears about the MarsNow mission and the attendant game show, a “Survivor-meets-Star-Trek amalgam,” in which the two winners—one man and one woman—will receive one-way tickets to Mars as the first Marsonauts in billionaire tech guru Geoff Task’s settlement. Seemingly against all odds, Amber is chosen to appear on the show; then, as 12 grueling weeks of challenges winnow down the competitors, it becomes a real possibility that she might win, leaving Earth, and Kevin, behind forever. Part disaffected-slacker rom-com, part social satire, part wistful end-of-the-world eulogy for ordinary, unscripted love, this novel veers close to the kind of wearying cynicism and late-stage capitalist master-villainy that would make its conceit feel familiar. Yet again and again the novel saves itself from this fate by the very real hope at the heart of its main characters’ binary orbit around each other—that love may be enough after all; if not to save them, then at least to make sure they will not be forgotten.

Winsome, sweet, and apocalyptic—a perfect blend for the end of days.

Kirkus Reviews

"How did Deborah Willis manage to write about love, grief, corporate greed, climate change, and a reality show that sends two people to Mars with such grace and humor and compassion? Girlfriend on Mars blew my mind! This is one of the most original novels I’ve read in a long time."

Ann Hood

"[Deborah] Willis [knows] how to tell a story with the grip of a good drama series... While the setup could have made for a breezy read, Willis cuts deep with insight... Every detail is sharply placed by Willis, who has a scorching sense of humor and a soft spot for humanity down here on Earth."

Alex Beggs

"Girlfriend on Mars veers giddily on the brink between satire and tragedy, transporting us to places we never dreamed we’d go... However fantastic, nutty and corrupt this all sounds, we are reminded that [Elon] Musk and his fellow billionaires are already deep into space travel. And that reality, together with Willis’ witty writing, entangles us in the quagmire of comedy, love and fear portrayed in these pages."

Toronto Star - Nancy Wigston

"Girlfriend on Mars is out of this world. Deborah Willis pushes the absurdly miserable, deeply addictive pleasure of reality TV to its only possible end, zooming from euphoria past satire to slam into real life and death. Prescient and poignant, Amber’s reality is an inch from coming true."

Marina Endicott

"A perfectly observed satire that captures the absurdity—and beauty—of twenty-first century life. It reminded me of so many favorite novelists, from Margaret Atwood to Dave Eggers to Alexandra Kleeman. I loved it."

Joanna Rakoff

"A deeply moving, deeply funny novel about love and loyalty in the midst of the paralyzing effects of eco-anxiety and the seductive toxicity of reality entertainment... Girlfriend on Mars is propulsive and surprising in the very best ways—Deborah Willis writes with a combination of pathos and humor that entrances and lights a way forward in this troubled time."

Suzette Mayr