"It’s hard to write something totally new, but Brian Castleberry has managed it. The Californians is a story within a story within a story—set across three distinct time periods and featuring an incredible cast of interconnected characters who are all trying to figure out how to make art and money and not let the making of one consume the other. Somehow Castleberry manages the spectacular feat of writing a novel that can be read forwards, backwards and sideways, and the result is a book I’ll be thinking about for years to come." — Rachel Beanland, author of Florence Adler Swims Forever and The House is on Fire
"Discovering the nature of the characters’ associations and intersections across the chapters is one of the richest pleasures of the book. Another pleasure: the detailed portraits of 20th-century American life. Each chapter is a neatly packed and well-researched time capsule,...the close-clinging omniscient narration nimbly taking on the voices of each decade." — New York Times Book Review on Nine Shiny Objects
"Marked by literary ambition. ... This is a story about how our individual histories follow us, about light versus dark, but also about our clouded perception of America—and how it continues to divide us." — Elle on Nine Shiny Objects
"The truly shining objects are the nine stories that make up this gripping, shapeshifting novel. A debut out of this world." — Hernan Diaz, author of In the Distance, on Nine Shiny Objects
“Sharply tuned, funny, satisfyingly strange, and preternaturally poised, unspooling in immaculate prose. Brian Castleberry has that rare, can’t-be-taught ability to turn smoothly at any point in any direction, giving each sentence, no matter how casual, a quiet current of electric suspense.” — William Finnegan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Barbarian Days, on Nine Shiny Objects
“Impressive... Memorable characters inhabit a surprising, engaging story of American idealism and its dark opposite.” — Kirkus Reviews on Nine Shiny Objects