Unspectacular

Author: Zaq Baker

Publisher: Zaq Baker (2025)

Featuring six unique perspectives, rich in symbolism, and generous in levity, Unspectacular is a voice-driven novel that will appeal to consumers of music culture, psychological fiction, family stories, and Asian-American literature. Entertaining and concise — with a swift, gripping plot — Unspectacular is crafted for accessibility and shares as much pace and rhythm with television as with its bookshelfmates.

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Mae Strand, twenty, is a compulsive liar and budding but reluctant Chicago vocalist whose mother's mysterious prior life is starting to loom dangerously large over her own. Coerced into recording a studio album by entertainment lawyer Robert Koenid, Mae is forced to choose between a small shot at fame or music's intrinsic value, all while she crests adulthood with her independence at stake.

A few blocks away, Ajay Chadhana is offered a rare opportunity: Skip a step in the software career he's been building since he decamped from the cricket pitches of Eastern India... at the cost of severely hardening his heart. As he races toward thirty, Ajay must draw a line between the advantages of corporate life and his harried nights as a session drummer — a crisis of ambition and self-care.