Lovell Holder makes his literary debut with The Book of Luke (Grand Central Publishing, December 2025), a USA Today bestseller and a Marie Claire Best Book of 2025. Told across dual timelines, the novel follows Luke Griffin, a former reality-show champion who returns to the cutthroat competition series that made him famous just as his adult life — including his marriage to the country’s only openly gay senator — begins to unravel. For fans of Survivor and Less, it’s a fast-paced, emotionally sharp look at fame, complicity, and forgiveness.

Before turning to fiction, Holder built a career as a filmmaker, directing and co-writing the features Lavender Men and Loserville, and producing The Surrender, Peak Season, and Working Man, among others. That instinct for pacing and structure carries through to the page — critics have called the novel “twisty” and “cliffhanger”-driven, with Library Journal awarding it a starred review. A graduate of Princeton University and Brown University (MFA), Holder splits his time between Los Angeles and Charlotte, North Carolina.

Holder brings a filmmaker’s eye for drama and a novelist’s patience for nuance to his very first book. Don’t miss his conversation on reality TV, reinvention, and reckoning with the past at the Salt Lake Book Festival.