Andrea Uptmor’s The New People takes the “uninvited guests” motif to new heights by posing the question: What happens when you move into a new home with the promise of a fresh start, only to find out the previous owners are secretly living in the attic? For newlywed Chicagoans Emma and Rachel, this is their reality as they relocate to their new home in Riverbend, Indiana, months after the 2008 housing bubble burst.
Emma and Rachel begin their new lives in the conservative college town of Riverbend, where Rachel becomes a tenured-track professor at the nearby university after the success of her best-selling book, and Emma follows as an adjunct professor while she tries to return to writing and recover from a devastating miscarriage. Amid this newness, Emma struggles with the shift from a progressive city to a suburban enclave. The minute Emma enters the newly flipped house, purchased for less than the price of condos on Chicago’s North Side, she senses that, beyond the shoddy renovations and the previous owners’ abandoned furniture, something is off. The house is still home to the former owners, Charlotte and Dirk, who secretly sequestered themselves in the attic after their house was foreclosed. As a retired couple who became victims of the ’08 financial crisis, they were unable to move on and not ready to let go of the house, in the hope their estranged son, Justin, would one day return home. On a mission to push the new people out of their house, Charlotte has, behind her husband’s back, concocted a plan to slowly force Emma and Rachel out by causing mysterious plumbing and electrical disturbances.
What starts as Emma and Rachel’s journey into the uncertainty of their new life becomes an exploration of how to navigate change. As we follow Emma’s emotional interior while living in the shadow of her wife’s success, it becomes apparent from the opening pages that Emma’s choice to move was not truly her own. And her growing awareness of feeling both out of control and out of place in this new life is palpable. Uptmor emphasizes Emma’s discomfort in Riverbend through the reactions of her neighbors, students, and peers to her presence. Uptmor’s deliberate choice to have Emma and Rachel be not only foreign to the neighborhood through their physical presence but also a same-sex couple living in a conservative town ups the tension of feeling out of place. At the same time, the novel offers a mirror of the differences and similarities in how each character accepts change in their lives. By creating a stark contrast between the political ideals Emma and Rachel represent and the opposing perspectives of their neighbors and students.
Readers can look closely at how different characters from different backgrounds react to change. There is the nosy neighbor, Patty, who, upon seeing the couple arrive next door, takes it upon herself to let them know the rules of garden upkeep, yet she can’t hide her facial expressions when she finds out her neighbors are in a same-sex relationship. Then there is Emma’s student, Alex, who happens to be an active member of the Campus Conservative Alliance and provokes Emma with his ideological extremism sprinkled throughout the assignment papers he writes. By having Alex and Patty serve as opposing forces in the couple’s worldview, we can observe how some react to change by imposing their viewpoint on others, pressuring anyone who is different. In addition to using these antagonist characters to interrogate how people react to differences, the novel’s 2008 setting adds another layer, as Emma and Rachel move into Riverbend ahead of Barack Obama’s election, whose campaign ran on the premise of change and intensified the atmosphere of “change in the air.” As we see how Emma’s neighbor and student react to changes in their lives, we turn our attention to how she copes with change. This is reflected in the decisions she makes, from firmly asserting herself when Alex provokes her with his conservative opinions to secretly pursuing IVF unbeknownst to Rachel.
However, Emma isn’t the only character who feels out of control in her life. Charlotte is dealing with her own lack of control while cooped up in the attic with her husband. After being evicted from their home and grappling with the estrangement of their son Justin, who struggles with addiction and mental health challenges, their last hope of clinging to Justin returning home and going back to normalcy lies in the one thing that was taken away from them: their house. For Charlotte, the house represents not only something that once belonged to her but also an ideal image of her life, one in which Justin would someday return home and she could rebuild their relationship despite the challenges. Charlotte and Dirk serve as a direct mirror to Rachel and Emma. Both couples mourn the loss of a child and live on the flip side of one another. This mirroring technique runs throughout the novel, as characters reflect their shared experiences in their coping with the unraveling of their lives. The juxtaposition of Dirk and Charlotte, dealing with the pain of losing their son Justin to addiction and carrying the weight of this estrangement, against Emma’s pain of struggling to conceive both a child and a bookasks the reader to consider what happens when life doesn’t go to plan and everything is out of control. Do you let go or do you hold on tighter in fear of what comes next?
Beyond the characters serving as reflections of one another, Uptmor parallels the economic conditions defined by the era in which the book is set. Set during the 2008 recession, when houses were going into foreclosure and finding jobs for new graduates was difficult, the novel echoes a period of instability we’re experiencing now. There is a sense we are currently mirroring that period, with a bleak job market and rising unaffordability. At a time when everything is uncertain and nothing feels stable, The New People shows that the power of change lies not in what happens to you, but in how you respond to it. Focusing on the journey of Emma and Charlotte as they grapple with losing control amid the fear of the surrounding newness, this story echoes our current political and economic climate. Through Uptmor’s ability to develop a unique plot with heartfelt characters, we see how we are all dealing with change that seems to turn our world upside down, and it’s not until we connect with others that we can put our lives into perspective. The New People underscores that, in the end, we are all clinging to hope. Hoping things will change for the better, and by doing so, we can cope with the losses of what was left behind.
FICTION
The New People
By Andrea Uptmor
Little Brown and Company
Published July 21, 2026
