From Two Dollar Radio

Very pleased to announce the publication of The Only Ones, Editions Le Nouvel Attila September 7 2017. traduit de l'americain par Theophile Sersiron.

French cover

Carola Dibbell's novel, The Only Ones, was selected by:


A debut novel on par with some of the best speculative fiction of the past 30 years, The Only Ones deserves to be shelved alongside Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring, and P. D. James' The Children of Men. It's that good, and that important, and that heartbreakingly beautiful.

--Jason Heller, NPR Books

A thrilling look at motherhood, class and gender, and what it means to be human.”

--Isaac Fitzgerald, Buzzfeed, #6SecondBookReview

Her name is Inez, but the story opens with her telling us her sobriquet, I. "That's what they call me. I'm lucky they call me anything." She might as well be saying, Call me Ishmael.

--Jenna Leigh Evans, Electric Literature

A bracing, tough minded, farsighted novel about bravery and endurance, motherhood and the way life goes on even after the world ends. Every sentence pierces.

--Kelly Link, author, Magic for Beginners

On the other side of Aldous Huxley's brave new world is Carola Dibbell's braver one, all the more unsettling (and maybe even more profound) for being not five hundred years from now but five minutes, in a time at once beyond our control and too immediate to escape. Brilliantly conceived, passionately defiant, deeply felt, The Only Ones introduces--in the form of central character Inez Fardo--one of the most memorable and compelling first-person voices in recent American fiction.

--Steve Erickson, author, These Dreams of You

At times, The Only Ones feels large, small, sweeping and intimate, scary and full of hope. Dense and vivid, smart and thought-provoking.

--Charles Yu, author, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

How can a writer this good have waited so long for her due? . . . Carola Dibbell's marvellous narrative has pace, emotional range, plenty of humour--some bitter, some sweet--and one of the most harshly enthralling narrators in fiction since Huckleberry Finn.

--Adam Mars-Jones, author, Cedilla

This is an enthralling journey through a near future, plague filled landscape, presented with such gritty clarity and such a darkly humorous eye for detail that it feels completely real. Inez' deadpan account of her heroic struggle to keep her daughter alive in the ruins of Brooklyn and Queens--a devastated but curiously familiar world, filled with maddening school bureaucracies and public transport that never comes becomes a fantastic portrait of what it is to raise a child.

--Mary Harron, director, I Shot Andy Warhol, The Notorious Bettie Page

Book cover

A novel about bringing up a child, told as science fiction.

Carola Dibbell has published fiction in Paris Review, The New Yorker, Fence, and Black Clock. Her writing on books, film, children's media, and especially music appeared frequently at a time when she was one of the few women writing rock criticism. She lives in New York with her husband, the critic Robert Christgau, and their daughter.

The Only Ones is her debut novel.