Madeleine Gray

An irresistible and messy love story about the terrible allure of wanting something that promises nothing

At 24, Hera is a clump of unmet potential. To her, the future is nothing but an exhausting thought exercise, one depressing hypothetical after another. She’s sharp in more ways than one, adrift in her own smug malaise, until her new job moderating the comments section of an online news outlet—a role even more mind-numbing than it sounds—introduces her to Arthur, a middle-aged journalist. Though she's preferred women to men for years now, she soon finds herself falling into an all-consuming affair with him. She is coming apart with want and loving every second of it! Well, except for the tiny hiccup of Arthur’s wife—and that said wife has no idea Hera exists.

With its daringly specific and intimate voice, Green Dot is a darkly hilarious and deeply felt examination of the joys and indignities of coming into adulthood against the pitfalls of the twenty-first century and the winding, tortuous, and often very funny journey we take in deciding who we are and who we want to be.

A Novel

Green Dot

Lindsey Barnett

My ex-girlfriend used to say that life was about commitment to the bit," and if that is the case I am living life so much it's wild.

I don't know how to be in my own body, my own mind.I want to care about a story, any story.

I wonder if life is just trying to encounter new situations that will bring you back to old joy, or if there is new joy to be found and, if so, where is it, does he know?

But I am beginning to accept that I am my flesh, and that when there is more of it, there is more of me. 

And I know that he loves me; never once have I doubted this. But I also know that people who love you can do things that would suggest otherwise.

Green Dot quotes

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