A New Kind of Clean

Haunting philosophical horror about what one aspiring actress is willing to surrender in exchange for making her dreams come true—a groundbreaking collaboration from the author of I'm Thinking of Ending Things and the filmmaker of Our Father, the Devil

For years, Missy Djalo has been running from audition to audition, no closer to her dream of playing Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—and no further from her troubled memories of her fractured relationship with her Cameroonian mother. Missy is broke and desperate when she gets called for an audition by a cryptic company called Air Free. Could this be her long-awaited break?

From the moment Missy walks through the door of Air Free’s beautiful house and meets the charismatic couple that inhabits it, she’s already auditioning—though she doesn’t know it, or even understand what she’s auditioning for. As she journeys deeper into the house, the limits of reality and fantasy become increasingly blurred. What will Missy have to forfeit for her dream? Her privacy, her relationships, her individuality, her memories—even her identity?

Told in spare, hypnotic prose, A New Kind of Clean is a surreal, minimalist fable about memory, alienation, ambition, and reality.