One night in Chinatown: Our heroine, Lola, is at a work reunion dinner with her former colleagues when she ducks out to buy cigarettes and runs into an ex-boyfriend. And then . . . another. And another. The city is suddenly awash with ghosts of heartbreaks past, and what would normally pass for a coincidence becomes something much stranger. The soon-to-be-married Lola must contend not only with the viability of her current relationship but with the fact that both her best friend and her former boss, a magazine editor turned guru, might have an unhealthy, ahem, investment in the outcome. Memories of the past swirl and converge in mystical ways both comic and eerie as Lola is forced to decide if she will buy into romance, and possibly into a weird startup-slash-cult.

Both suspenseful and delightfully funny, this new novel from Sloane Crosley combines the breathtaking twists and turns of a psychological thriller with the will-she-won't-she of romantic comedy. Cult Classic is an original: a masterfully crafted, surrealist meditation on love in an age when the past is ever at your fingertips and sanity is for sale.