Bill Roorbach’s ‘Beep’ book launch

An ebullient, funny, and hugely original novel told from the perspective of Beep, a squirrel monkey who—with the help of a brilliant young girl— forges the way forward for a planet in crisis.​

In this immensely enjoyable and wise novel, it takes a sweet and personable squirrel monkey, Beep, to help us see the world we live in more clearly. While intending only to go deeper and higher into the Costa Rican rain forest to find a mate, he instead meets Inga, a kindly American tween on vacation with her family. Inadvertently, Beep travels to Manhattan with Inga. With her devoted help—and a bit of inspiration from a visiting Greta Thunberg, along with a dramatic zoo liberation—Beep manages to change the destiny of the world. He even finds his monkey love. Along the way, a vast cast of engaging and perceptive animals have a great deal to say about humanity and the divisions among us, our alien cities, our strange practices, our folly, as well as our beauty, and our promise, unfulfilled.

For fans of Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures and Dave Eggers’s The Eyes and the Impossible, Beep is full of humor, inspiration, and remarkable new ways of understanding how we live. Urgent but never earnest in the face of the increasing threats to our planet, Beep the monkey inspires us all to stop being the problem and start being the solution, loving and laughing all the way.

Bill Roorbach is an American novelist, short story and nature writer, memoirist, journalist, blogger and critic. He has authored fiction and nonfiction works including Big Bend, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the O. Henry Prize. His most recent novel was Lucky Turtle, a 2022 recommended read from the New York Times book critics and editors.  Bill’s books of instruction include Writing Life Stories (Penguin RandomHouse), and The Art of Truth: Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (Oxford University Press). Both are used in writing programs around the country to this day. Remarkably, all but one of Bill’s books are still in print and available wherever you like to buy books, preferably your local independent bookstore. Or find them in your town or school library. Bill lives with his family in Scarborough and Farmington, Maine.