By Bret Easton Ellis
Knopf | 192pgs
Release date: June 15, 2010

Summary:
Twenty-five years later, Bret Easton Ellis revisits the characters that put him on the literary map in Imperial Bedrooms, the sequel to his breakout debut novel Less Than Zero. The rich, drug-fueled, young hipsters may have grown into middle age, but older doesn’t necessarily mean wiser. When narrator Clay, now a well known screenwriter working in New York, returns to L.A. to cast his movie about teens in the 1980′s, he quickly falls in with his old crowd. On the surface the glitz and glamor of the City of Angels appears unchanged from Clay’s youth, but a current of quiet desperation flows underneath. His ex-girlfriend Blair is now married to the ever unfaithful Trent, Julian runs an escort service specializing in teenage girls and Rip is almost unrecognizable due to all the plastic surgery that has mangled his face. Things take a decidedly noir turn as Clay begins a destructive affair with a talentless starlet. Mysterious text messages and strange cars parked menacingly outside his apartment push him into a paranoid panic that forces him to look into the darkness of his own soul.

What critics are saying:
Ellis took the title Less Than Zero from an Elvis Costello song, and uses one of Costello’s album titles for its follow up. Like the author’s first novel, Imperial Bedrooms has been very well received by critics. Clark Collis of Entertainment Weekly concludes: “You can understand why Ellis stole the title of Costello’s most sexually evocative album for Imperial Bedrooms; there is certainly no shortage of boudoir-set drama. Yet he would have been justified in calling it My Aim Is True. This sequel is very much on target.”