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Irina Ember

Goodreads Author

Member Since

June 2023

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Irina Ember lives within fifty miles of the San Francisco Bay Area. She has two novels: Bad Agency and Gold City.

Kirkus review below:

BAD AGENCY
BY IRINA EMBER

A raw, revelatory novel about the ways trauma can shape a life.

In Ember’s debut novel, a real estate agent struggles to prevent her past from sabotaging her present.

Ruby lives under a cloud of anxiety and depression. A successful real estate agent in the Bay Area, she refuses to give in to self-pity, even when an irate stranger spits on her in the middle of traffic: “I have no right to complain about the pain inside my head, my body, my soul,” she claims. “So many people in this world have real suffering that is much worse than mine.” Ruby is haunted by the abuse she suffered at the han Irina Ember lives within fifty miles of the San Francisco Bay Area. She has two novels: Bad Agency and Gold City.

Kirkus review below:

BAD AGENCY
BY IRINA EMBER

A raw, revelatory novel about the ways trauma can shape a life.

In Ember’s debut novel, a real estate agent struggles to prevent her past from sabotaging her present.

Ruby lives under a cloud of anxiety and depression. A successful real estate agent in the Bay Area, she refuses to give in to self-pity, even when an irate stranger spits on her in the middle of traffic: “I have no right to complain about the pain inside my head, my body, my soul,” she claims. “So many people in this world have real suffering that is much worse than mine.” Ruby is haunted by the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother and by a psychotic break she experienced decades ago. She struggles in her romantic life, as she has a tendency to prioritize the needs of the men she dates over her own. As she shepherds annoying and ungrateful clients through potential home purchases—often trying to ignore the addicted and mentally ill people who live on the streets right outside—Ruby fights to get a better hold on her personal and professional relationships. Ultimately, though, the relationship she most needs to figure out is the one she has with herself. The author’s prose captures Ruby’s sharp, obsessive inner monologue, as when she fantasizes about the new man in her life, a Burning Man fan in his 50s named Nate: “It was Sunday and I was scheduled to hold the open house for Ugly-Jacket Lady. I wished I could have stayed with Nate, maybe climbed onto the back of his scooter…I was still high from our encounter, and I couldn’t focus on anything, not that selling real estate requires more thought or consciousness than it takes to drool.” Ember highlights Ruby’s trauma a bit too emphatically—a more subtle introduction of the subject would likely have been more effective—but she effectively dramatizes Ruby’s pathology in a way that demonstrates the intractability of her pain. A short novel at less than 150 pages, this narrative offers a startling and often moving slice of contemporary life.

A raw, revelatory novel about the ways trauma can shape a life.

Review Posted Online: May 16, 2023
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Irina Ember’s books

Average rating: 3.79 · 39 ratings · 13 reviews · 2 distinct works • Similar authors

	Bad Agency 3.69 avg rating — 35 ratings — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Gold City 4.75 avg rating — 4 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.

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Irina Ember's Blog

Rock-Solid Kirkus Review for Gold City

I'm so happy about this new Kirkus review, thank you anonymous reviewer:

An imaginative and ominous vision of things soon to come.

Ayoung woman battles a massive corporation to rescue her mother from sinister medical experiments in Ember’s SF thriller.

This novel depicts a near-future San Francisco, renamed Gold City, controlled by the totalitarian Y Corporation, which provides residents a vaccine th Read more of this blog post »

3 likes · Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on May 03, 2026 13:56 • Tags: dystopian-fiction, gold-city

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Requiem for a Dream

by Hubert Selby Jr.

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Irina Ember is now following Sandra Floyd's reviews
May 12, 2026 02:57PM · like
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Jan 25, 2026 08:18PM · like
Irina Ember liked Sandra Floyd's review of Gold City: "This story is a unique blend of George Orwell and Margaret Atwood, with a dash of Dave Eggers. It blends science fiction with a modern dystopian society. The reading was slow at times as my brain filled in missing grammatical sentences but, the more " Read more of this review »
Jan 25, 2026 07:55PM · see review
Irina Ember rated a book it was amazing Gold City by Irina Ember (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
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