Andrew Ridker was born in 1991. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Boston Review, The Believer and St. Louis Magazine, and he is the editor of Privacy Policy- The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics. He is the recipient of an Iowa Arts Fellowship from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The Altruists is his first novel.
A whip-smart, wickedly funny and psychologically acute novel about the cost of doing good. The finale... hits the sweet spot between hilarity and pathos with particularly excruciating precision, but there's something to impress on every page. * Daily Mail * Reading Andrew Ridker's debut novel, you soon realise you're in the presence of a new talent... It's a novel about hypocrisy; about how complex power structures make hypocrites of us all, and about why it's important to accept that and love one another anyway... Ridker writes in crisp, sometimes side-splitting prose. * The Times * The Altruists, Andrew Ridker's intelligent, funny and remarkably assured first novel... [establishes him] as a big, promising talent... Ridker's ambitious blend of global perspective and intimate human comedy seems likely to evoke comparisons to the work of Jonathan Franzen and Nathan Hill. -- Stephen McCauley * New York Times Book Review * [A] smart novel with an impressive balance between satire and heart. * Sunday Times * This is a smart, knowing, tender first novel, full of immaculate comic timing and loquacious chutzpah. * Spectator *