Teenage Rock Climbers Face the Future in Gabriel Tallent’s ‘Crux’ — See the Cover! (Exclusive)

Gabriel Tallent is returning to the page.

The bestselling author of My Absolute Darling has a new novel set to publish early next year, PEOPLE can exclusively announce. Crux will be published in early 2026 from Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

Tallent’s debut novel about a young girl who attempts to escape the isolated California woods where she grew up received accolades like the LA Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize.

In Crux, the author tackles the theme of friendship. Dan and Tamma are high school seniors living in the Mojave Desert. The teens are polar opposites who dream of a life beyond their hometown, where they can continue their mutual passion for rock climbing. 

But as the school year wears on, and the realities of life after graduation begin to materialize, Dan and Tamma are pulled apart by differences of class, ability and new options of what their future may look like.

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The novel has already garnered early praise from authors like Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow‘s Gabrielle Zevin, and is “a rollicking, adrenaline-filled and soul-searching novel about risking everything to change your life,” per Riverhead Books.

Crux also holds an important meaning for the author, he tells PEOPLE.

“To me, the book is about nursing a dream — an ambitious, out-of-reach, maybe-impossible dream,” he explains. “I have watched many of my closest friends grapple with this, and I mean grapple. And yet, I have seen people sacrifice everything to attain the highest levels of success only to find that it meant nothing to them.”

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“I wanted to write about these two desperate kids, throwing themselves into the pursuit of a perilous dream,” he adds, “because it raises some of the questions that we all have to ask ourselves, over and over again, as we fight to grow into the people we want to be.”

Crux will be published on Jan. 20, 2026 and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.