'The Book of Luke': the reality TV novel worth chasing across two continents
'I read it in one sitting': the debut novel that's part Survivor, part Hunger Games, part Love Island
I spent months trying to buy Lovell Holder’s debut novel The Book of Luke, and Amazon Australia cancelled my international order twice.
I still don’t know why.
It took a trip to Hawaii, and a very lucky stop into a Barnes and Noble, to finally get my hands on a copy.
I read the entire book on the flight home, cover to cover, in one sitting.
That should tell you everything about how good it is.
The novel follows Luke Griffin, a former college football star whose career ends in a car crash in 2003.
Ashamed of his scars and drifting through depression, Luke takes a spot on Endeavor, a brutal reality competition filmed in the Cayman Islands. Think Survivor’s physical trials, Hunger Games’ engineered cruelty and Love Island’s forced intimacy, all filtered through merciless editing.
On that first season, Luke falls for two people: Arjun Bhaduri, a magnetic fellow contestant, and Barnes Appleby, who becomes his husband, and the United States’ only openly gay Republican senator.
The novel then jumps forward to 2015, where Luke is a stay-at-home father in Washington DC and Barnes’s career is engulfed by a scandal involving affairs with former staffers.
Luke files for divorce. Barnes’s legal team argues Luke has no career and no assets of his own, and threatens to fight for full custody of their children.
Desperate for money and leverage, Luke takes an enormous payday to return to Endeavor for its 20th season.
What follows is chaos: a volatile cast, a coercion scheme disguised as a breakfast ritual, a leaked video and a health scare, all building to a finale where old wounds and new betrayals collide on a collapsing rope bridge above open water.
Midway through the season, Barnes himself arrives as a “legendary alternate,” turning Endeavor into a stage for his own political comeback.
What struck me most was how sharply Holder writes cancel culture. One contestant publicly accuses Luke of having contributed, years earlier, to a former castmate’s death, a charge levelled with the language of justice but wielded as a personal weapon.
The novel doesn’t let anyone off easily. Luke’s instinct to absorb blame and volunteer himself for elimination as penance is as much a critique of internet pile-ons as it is of his own guilt.
Barnes is the more provocative creation. He has built a national identity on being the exception, the openly gay Republican senator, while behaving at home like entitlement has no consequences.
Watching him resign from the Senate mid-scandal, then reframe his return to Endeavor as a rescue mission for Luke, is a masterclass in political spin. Holder never lets him off the hook for it either.
Luke himself is the calm centre of the chaos: quietly furious, endlessly pragmatic, and never quite able to stop performing decency even when the show punishes him for it.
By the finale, when the rope bridge gives way and Luke unclips his own harness to save someone else, I was properly holding my breath, somewhere over the Pacific.
The Book of Luke is out now in the US. If, like me, you can’t find it locally yet, it’s worth the hunt.