Close Relationships with Strangers (June 23, 2026, Simon & Schuster) follows a Las Vegas wildlife photographer who moves to Los Angeles to become a paparazzo and in the process loses his relationships, his morals, and eventually his tether to reality.
Raves and Reviews
"A chilly, accomplished debut that unflinchingly dissects our obsession with celebrity."—Kirkus Reviews
"A perfect novel for celebrity-culture lovers and skeptics alike."
—Booklist
“Diamond convincingly brings to life the amoral Ben and his eroded sense of self… It’s a distinctive character portrait.”
—Publishers Weekly
“I’ve been more obsessed with celebrity culture than I care to admit. I felt seen by Diamond. There’s an ineffable tension to the writing in this book that Diamond lets readers traverse across a tightrope.” —Debutiful
“I loved Krista Diamond’s Close Relationships with Strangers, an atmospheric LA noir about obsession and the predatory machinery of celebrity (my shit). Desperate and morally adrift, Ben is a compelling antihero—a loner paparazzo hunting the one photograph that could save him.”
—Anna Dorn, author of Perfume & Pain
"Close Relationships with Strangers is a taut, mesmerizing portrait of a photographer undone by the images he pursues. An elegant exploration of desire and delusion, Krista Diamond’s debut is as haunting as it is humane."
—Antonia Angress, author of Sirens & Muses
“Krista Diamond beautifully depicts Ben, a paparazzo at the end of the golden age of tabloid photography, as he is drawn into the liminal zone between illusion and delusion. She's captured the uncanny solitude of Las Vegas and Los Angeles, both cities in the American west that loom as simulacra in popular imagination, with an undercurrent of nostalgia for the recent past in this story of a loner obsessively pursuing his already anachronistic calling; it's reminiscent of the noir stories of Raymond Chandler and Nathaniel West, and the mood it evokes has stayed with me a very long time.”
—Maile Chapman, author of Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto