We are thrilled to be sharing an excerpt from Claire Betita de Guzman’s Sudden Superstar! Releasing on 21 November 2023 with pre-order now available, read on to discover the synopsis and excerpt!
What happens when one goes from obscurity to celebrity, overnight?
Thirty-year-old Arya Alvarez is a travel manager at Isle Z, a luxury travel company in Singapore where she creates bespoke trips for celebrities and influencers. Discretion is her specialty at work and personal life: few people know that she’s fled her home city, Manila, to get away from the scene of a devastating break-up.
When she travels to Svaneti, in the Republic of Georgia, Arya briefly encounters the mysterious Dave in a remote village high up the Caucasus mountains. Intrigued, she posts his photos on Instagram-which goes viral the very next day. Turns out, Dave is Davit Nadibaidze, a famous yet reclusive artist who’d retreated from the public five years ago and Arya is the first person to see him since he disappeared.
In less than 24 hours, Arya gains hundreds of thousands of followers. She’s deluged with invitations to talk shows, influencer parties, and celebrity junkets, all as her social media apps overflow with DMs, tags, and comments, both nice and nasty. Men are suddenly vying for her attention, including her ex, Jake.
Arya tries her best to step up, but she also struggles. What she really wants is to finally get over her painful break-up, find herself and a fresh start. But can she really, when she’s caught in this complex whirl of viral fame?
EXCERPT
Singapore, 10:44 a.m. When I saw the numbers, I thought my Instagram account had been hacked.
Not that I know exactly what happens when an IG account gets hacked. Seriously, I was clueless. I hadn’t been paying attention to the nitty-gritty of social media, busy as I was making the hundred and ninety-ninth change in my clients’ meticulously customised itineraries, or breaking up real-time fights of travel influencers, not to mention the travelling, the back and forth to Changi Airport for yet another flight for a fam tour or with a client. Would it be like on Facebook where all your friends would be sent a malignant link to a scam website or a porn site? If your account was hacked, wouldn’t it disappear or be deleted, like how some Instagram celebrities complain about being unable to access their own accounts?
Ah, to disappear. There was a part of me that half-wished that maybe this should’ve happened to my IG instead because with my puny following—less than 1,000 as of my last check, a couple of days ago—and my hundred or so half-hearted updates (‘Cypriot rosé by the beach,’ I wrote in a post three weeks ago, with an awkward photo of a sweating wine glass against yellow-and-white striped umbrellas), it wouldn’t really be catastrophic if I actually lost my IG account. I would just start over with a new one.
Unlike, say, Angelique van Leuven and her 4,000 posts, and most especially, her heaving, magnificent 11 million followers. What would she do if her account was hacked and lose all that following?
But no one’s account was being hacked. No one was losing followers at all—in fact, someone seemed to be gaining a shitload of followers by the minute.
What had only happened was that Angelique simply shared my post on Dave. On Stories on Instagram. Where she has 11 million followers.
So I guess I have to stop thinking that there had been a glitch, or that my IG account was broken. I guess I should have expected the 10,209 likes that I just saw on my post on Dave on my Instagram feed.
Oops, it’s now 11,803 likes.
12,671 likes, just after a minute.
13,720 likes.
15,878 likes—wait, what was happening?
I stared hard at the Instagram post again at the very top of my feed, the one I had posted just two days ago. Dave stared back at me—well, actually, he merely gave an almost desultory glance in my direction while I was taking the video, before going back to making tiny brushstrokes on the painting in front of him. I swiped right and saw the other photos I had included in the post; Dave in a more relaxed position, sitting back and staring at his work, Dave dabbing his brush intently mixing colours on his palette, a zoomed-in shot of the silvery plant he was painting, a glimpse of the painting he was doing, a work in progress.
Were there really thousands of likes every thirty seconds?
I tapped the little heart icon on the upper right corner of my screen, the little red dot on the side, like a tiny round medal that signaled there was new activity in my account now a constant, now never disappearing. I tapped it again and again, IG’s version of refresh—as if I was in a trance. The numbers were jumping by the thousands each time my finger hit that little heart.
Was this really my Instagram account?
More importantly, who was Dave—I mean, Davit Nadibaidze?
‘THE Davit Nadibaidze is here!!! With fresh art!!!’
This was what Angelique van Leuven had written on her Instagram Stories, in the big, bold, italicized font she always chose. That was her repost of my most recent post that contained Dave’s video and photos.
I didn’t even have to Google who Davit Nadibaidze was. A few scrolls down and a media news outlet called Do Officiel explained it all to me, in sixty seconds. The media news site, with 4.6 million followers, had done something—downloaded my video, screenshotted Angelique’s post on Davit in her Stories—and made an actual video news report about it.
‘Hiding in Plain Sight,’ said the headline on the thumbnail in thick white letters. The video played, a cut-up of Angelique’s Stories post, and my own IG post.
It was all spoken in a well-modulated, galvanizing voice-over, but I read the caption underneath the post: ‘Davit Nadibaidze has been spotted! Found by one of us mere mortals on earth. Nadibaidze is the Georgian artist most famous for his obsession with the human figure and for causing one of the biggest stirs in recent art history. He has sparked a revival in figural painting with his rendition of mixed media art and raw, thought-provoking, larger-than-life portraits that has been lauded and exhibited in Berlin, Tbilisi, Zagreb, Paris, New York, Tokyo, and Singapore, among other key cities. It’s been reported that some of Nadibaidze’s unconventional processes include spending time in a morgue and observing plastic surgeons at work—all for him to discover and discern the nature, extremes, and possibilities of the body.’
Davit Nadibaidze was last seen in Venice, and it had been with his manager, who later appeared in an interview, this time sans Davit, on CNN. True, Davit had voluntarily retreated from the public eye, via a dramatic, revelatory TV interview in the same network a good five years ago. After that, it was amazing how he’d been kept visible and on the radar by his fans, pundits, and no less than the movers and shakers of the art world. But the voluntary retreat was also a concept that Davit’s fans seemed to have conveniently forgotten, putting out post after post pleading for him to come back, weeks and months after his ‘disappearance.’ A lot of the speculations centred around his remark in that last interview five years ago, where he said that he may or may not anymore produce any of the style of work that he was known for. He was ready for a shift, he was craving for a change, he said. David Nadibaidze was hungry for something else—for what exactly, he wasn’t ready to reveal just yet.
