Novels
THE SEQUEL (2024)
After the “insanely readable” (Stephen King) and “perfectly told” (Malcolm Gladwell)New York Times bestseller The Plot comes Jean Hanff Korelitz’s equally captivating new novel: The Sequel.
Anna Williams-Bonner has taken care of business. That is to say, she’s taken care of her husband, bestselling novelist Jacob Finch Bonner, and laid to rest those anonymous accusations of plagiarism that so tormented him. Now she is living the contented life of a literary widow, enjoying her husband’s royalty checks in perpetuity, but for the second time in her life, a work of fiction intercedes, and this time it’s her own debut novel, The Afterword. After all, how hard can it really be to write a universally lauded bestseller?
But when Anna publishes her book and indulges in her own literary acclaim, she begins to receive excerpts of a novel she never expected to see again, a novel that should no longer exist. That it does means something has gone very wrong, and someone out there knows far too much: about her late brother, her late husband, and just possibly... Anna, herself. What does this person want and what are they prepared to do? She has come too far, and worked too hard, to lose what she values most: the sole and uncontested right to her own story. And she is, by any standard, a master storyteller.
With her signature wit and sardonic humor, Jean Hanff Korelitz gives readers an antihero to root for while illuminating and satirizing the world of publishing in this deliciously fun and suspenseful read.
THE LATECOMER (2022)
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Plot (a Tonight Show Summer Read pick, and You Should Have known (adapted as HBO’s The Undoing), Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Latecomer is the story of three siblings, locked in mutual loathing, and the upending of their family with the late arrival of a fourth.
The Oppenheimer triplets have been reared with every advantage: wealth, education, and the determined attention of at least one of their parents. But neither Harrison (the smart one), Lewyn (the weird one) nor Sally (the girl) suspects the devastating event that set their family in motion, or understands how fully it has already formed them.
Now, on the verge of their departure for college and desperate to escape one another at last, the triplets are forced to contend with an unexpected complication: a fourth Oppenheimer sibling, formerly a leftover embryo from their own long ago in vitro genesis, has just been born. What has possessed their parents to make such an unfathomable decision? How can the triplets begin to imagine the impact this unwanted latecomer will have on their lives, or the ways she will work to bring them home?
The Latecomer is a tender and witty family story from an accomplished author, known for the depth of her character studies and her love of a plot twist.
THE PLOT (2021)
Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot is a psychologically suspenseful novel about a story too good not to steal, and the writer who steals it.
"THE PLOT is one of the best novels I’ve ever read about writers and writing. It’s also insanely readable and terrifying. The suspense quotient is through the roof." — Stephen King
From its first pages, The Plot ensnares you in a rich tangle of literary vanities, treachery and fraud. Psychologically acute and breathtakingly suspenseful, you’ll find yourself rushing towards a finale both astonishing and utterly earned. — Megan Abbott
Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he’s teaching in a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what’s left of his self-respect; he hasn’t written―let alone published―anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student, announces he doesn’t need Jake’s help because the plot of his book in progress is a sure thing, Jake is prepared to dismiss the boast as typical amateur narcissism. But then . . . he hears the plot.
Jake returns to the downward trajectory of his own career and braces himself for the supernova publication of Evan Parker’s first novel: but it never comes. When he discovers that his former student has died, presumably without ever completing his book, Jake does what any self-respecting writer would do with a story like that―a story that absolutely needs to be told.
In a few short years, all of Evan Parker’s predictions have come true, but Jake is the author enjoying the wave. He is wealthy, famous, praised and read all over the world. But at the height of his glorious new life, an e-mail arrives, the first salvo in a terrifying, anonymous campaign: You are a thief, it says.
As Jake struggles to understand his antagonist and hide the truth from his readers and his publishers, he begins to learn more about his late student, and what he discovers both amazes and terrifies him. Who was Evan Parker, and how did he get the idea for his “sure thing” of a novel? What is the real story behind the plot, and who stole it from whom?
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THE DEVIL AND WEBSTER (2017)
Naomi Roth is the first female president of Webster College, a once conservative school now known for producing fired-up, progressive graduates. So Naomi isn't surprised or unduly alarmed when Webster students begin the fall semester with an outdoor encampment around "The Stump"-a traditional campus gathering place for generations of student activists-to protest a popular professor's denial of tenure. A former student radical herself, Naomi admires the protestors' passion, especially when her own daughter, Hannah, joins their ranks. Then Omar Khayal, a charismatic Palestinian student with a devastating personal history, emerges as the group's leader, and the demonstration begins to consume Naomi's life, destabilizing Webster College from the inside out. As the crisis slips beyond her control, Naomi must take increasingly desperate measures to protect her friends, colleagues, and family from an unknowable adversary. Touching on some of the most topical and controversial concerns at the heart of our society, this riveting novel examines the fragility that lies behind who we think we are-and what we think we believe.
YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN/THE UNDOING (2014)
Now an HBO in a limited series, “The Undoing”, adapted by David E. Kelley and starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant and Donald Sutherland. Read More
Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself. Devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice, her days are full of familiar things: she lives in the very New York apartment in which she was raised, and sends Henry to the school she herself once attended. Dismayed by the ways in which women delude themselves, Grace is also the author of a book You Should Have Known, in which she cautions women to really hear what men are trying to tell them. But weeks before the book is published a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, an ongoing chain of terrible revelations. Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster, and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child and herself.
ADMISSION (2009)
For years, 38-year-old Portia Nathan has avoided the past, hiding behind her busy (and sometimes punishing) career as a Princeton University admissions officer and her dependable domestic life. Her reluctance to confront the truth is suddenly overwhelmed by the resurfacing of a life-altering decision, and Portia is faced with an extraordinary test. Just as thousands of the nation's brightest students await her decision regarding their academic admission, so too must Portia decide whether to make her own ultimate admission. Admission is at once a fascinating look at the complex college admissions process and an emotional examination of what happens when the secrets of the past return and shake a woman's life to its core.
THE WHITE ROSE (2004)
Passion, infidelity, social climbing, and one very special white rose weave a seductive narrative in this intelligent and tender novel. At forty-eight, Marian Kahn, a professor of history at Columbia, has reached a comfortable perch. Married, wealthy, and the famed discoverer of the eighteenth-century adventuress, Lady Charlotte Wilcox, she ought to be content. Instead, she is horrified to find herself profoundly in love with twenty-six-year-old Oliver, the son of her eldest friend. When Marian's cousin, the snobbish Barton, announces his engagement to Sophie, a graduate student in Marian's department, Marian, Oliver, and Sophie find their lives woefully entangled, and their hearts turned in unfamiliar directions. All three of them will learn that love may seldom be straightforward, but it's always a gift. THE WHITE ROSE is at once a nuanced and affectionate reimagining of Strauss's beloved opera, Der Rosenkavalier, and a mesmerizing novel of our own time and place.
THE SABBATHDAY RIVER (1999)
The first baby was found early on a weekend morning in September 1985, as the whole broad length of the Upper Valley braced for its annual riptide of strangers, and as the first maples on the banks of the Sabbathday River prepared to burst, obligingly, into flame…
Jogging outside the town of Goddard, New Hampshire, Naomi Roth finds the body of a newborn baby girl floating facedown in the Sabbathday River. News of the dead child spreads quickly through Goddard, and Naomi--an aging idealist, a former VISTA volunteer, and the founder of a women's quilting cooperative--is shocked when the community swiftly, implausibly fingers Heather Pratt, a young single mother notorious for her affair with a married man, as the prime suspect. It comes as an even greater shock when, after a long interrogation behind dosed doors, Heather confesses to the crime.
Moved and angered by Heather's plight--and increasingly isolated in conservative Goddard--Naomi engages the help of Judith Friedman, a lawyer and fellow "flatlander," to defend the young woman. But when the truth at the heart of this astonishing case--and the body of a second baby--comes to light, it is Naomi who must confront how little she has understood her town, her friend, and herself.
A JURY OF HER PEERS (1996)
In this electrifying legal thriller, public defender Sybylla Muldoon unwittingly encounters a massive and malignant conspiracy when her client, a homeless man, is accused of stabbing a child on a New York street. With its timely, terrifying premise and its strong, engaging female protagonist, this novel breaks fresh ground in the legal thriller genre.