Coming in September 2025
a new novel by Sheri Joseph
a new novel by Sheri Joseph
Advance praise for ANGELS AT THE GATE:
Sheri Joseph's mesmerizing Angels at the Gate is more than a campus novel, more than a mystery, more than a reflection on memory. It's a deeply-felt story of a young student, Leah, and her friends and classmates, as they begin to create the person they will become, and the choices they make that forever remind them of what they left behind. It's heartbreaking, joyful, and utterly unforgettable.
~Kevin Wilson, author of NOTHING TO SEE HERE and THE FAMILY FANG
Sheri Joseph plunges readers into the shadowy fog of tradition-bound Rockhaven University, where secrets, secret desires, and questions of loyalty swirl around cool girl Leah and her friend group of frat boys. With an unerring eye for the complex dynamics of pre-social media campus life, Joseph elegantly captures the 80s, complete with a to-die-for playlist. Compulsively readable and deliciously dark.
~Leslie Pietrzyk, author of ADMIT THIS TO NO ONE and SILVER GIRL
If you love a campus novel -- and who doesn't? -- meet Leah, your tour guide through a beguiling mystery set among the lamplit paths and leafy towers of a college as vivid and tinged with melancholy as the one in your memory. Cuskian in the sharpness of its observations of friends, family, and frenemies, Angels at the Gate exerts a subtle and haunting power.
~Christopher Castellani, author of LEADING MEN
In the tradition of The Secret History and The Group, Angels at the Gate reinvents the genre of the campus mystery. Leah, inexperienced in both romantic relationships and the privileged world of private colleges, seeks to unravel the mystery of a fellow student’s apparent suicide, perhaps in an attempt to find answers to her own mother’s suspicious death. Through breathtaking descriptions and witty dialogue, Joseph deftly and convincingly creates the rarified atmosphere of the newly co-ed Southern college on the hill, whose traditions, mores, and secrets remain opaque to Leah, even as she believes that her intellectual capacity allows her understanding. As the danger of the mystery increases, involving secret societies and unrequited longings, Leah realizes that the victim-- like Leah herself—like all of us-- longed most for unobtainable connection and intimacy. Through Joseph’s evocative prose and adept characterizations, this gorgeous novel reminds us, once again, how our earliest relationships may suggest our paths, but our vulnerable early adult years cement our futures.
~Allison Amend, author of ENCHANTED ISLANDS and A NEARLY PERFECT COPY
