One month until Last Seen Online releases!

THE FINAL COPIES ARE HEREEEEE ✨✨✨

Which means you have LESS THAN THIRTY DAYS to get your preorders in and snag a goody bag of signed postcards and bookmarks! Go go go!


Goodreads

Amazon UK

Waterstones

Audible

Foyles

Netgalley (for book bloggers)

Last Seen Online is a murder mystery set in the iconic LA of teen movies like Clueless and Booksmart. Through glam hollywood parties, two teen detectives investigate an old murder case by the cast of a paranormal TV show. The OJ- style press frenzy that followed the death has almost been forgotten when our teen characters start stirring up the past.

This is a book for people who, like me, grew up with the internet. A lot of the murder clues in the story are discovered online, in a multimedia ‘blog’ format that mimics the obsessive fan culture circling celebrities’ lives. It interrogates how teenagers interact with digital culture. It’s for fans of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, Gone Girl and Knives Out, or anyone who obsesses over Taylor Swift’s dating life, reads Vanity Fair articles about Caroline Calloway and mainlines true crime podcasts. It’s for people who loves messy, toxic women – and unreliable narrators.

Like We Were Liars, I wanted to create a book that changes when you read it for the second time. This is for readers who don’t accept what they’re told at face value, and want stories that stay in the mind after reading, that they can discuss in the group chat. There’s not just one twist in this story – it’s twist upon twist, all the way down. Get ready to dig in. 🔍

I’ve always wanted to do a fake epigraph in a book!! Love how this turned out so much.

If you can’t wait, here are…

TEN OTHER BOOKS ABOUT FANDOM

MY TOP THREE REAL LIFE INTERNET DRAMAS (Instagram reel)

BOOK VIBES VIDEO (Instagram reel)

Please preorder if you can! Here’s that Waterstones link again. To quote Robin Sloan (whose new book Moonbound is out this week!!), here’s why preorders matter:

“I know you understand very well the power of the algorithm: the way attention compounds. What you might not understand is the relatively modest scale of book publishing success. It only requires sales in the single-digit thousands to pop a book onto the bestseller lists, which can become gateways to further success. The point of the preorder, then, is to focus a diffuse field of interest into the hot week of a book’s release.”

14th July – Coventry Queer Writers workshop at St Marys Guildhall (1-3pm)

7th August – Scream Queens panel at Waterstones Piccadilly

13th August – Chairing Alice Oseman at Edinburgh Book Festival

21st August – Future Hopes with LR Lam and Tola Okogwu at Edinburgh Book Festival Schools programme

21st August – Internet Sleuthing for Beginners at Edinburgh Book Festival Schools programme

1st Sept – True Crime Thrillers at Coventry Queer Writers workshop at St Marys Guildhall (1-3pm)

28th Oct – 2nd Nov – Writer in Residence at The Exchange, Birmingham – book a one-to-one writing advice session

17th Nov – YALC – Heart rate critical panel with Karen McManus, Ravena Guron and Finn Longman

Published by Wren James

Wren James is the Carnegie-longlisted British author of many Young Adult novels as ‘Lauren James’, including Last Seen Online, Green Rising, The Reckless Afterlife of Harriet Stoker and The Quiet at the End of the World. Amazon MGM Studios is developing The Loneliest Girl in the Universe as a feature film. Joe Roth and Jeffrey Kirschenbaum will produce the film alongside Katherine Langford. They are a RLF Royal Fellow and the story consultant on Netflix’s Heartstopper (Seasons 2 and 3). Season 3 will guest star Jonathan Bailey, playing a role created by Wren.

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