The Winner

A New York Times Book Review and Washington Post "Top-10 Thriller of the Year"

A New Yorker, Vogue, Esquire, Elle, and Bookshop.org "Best Book of the Year'

Conor O’Toole has never been anywhere like Cutters Neck, a gated community near Cape Cod. It’s a sweet deal for the summer: in exchange for tennis lessons, he receives free lodging in a luxurious guest cottage, far from the cramped Yonkers apartment he shares with his diabetic mother.

In this oceanfront paradise, however, new clients prove hard to come by, and Conor has bills to pay. When Catherine, a sharp-tongued divorcée, offers double his usual rate, he soon realizes she is expecting additional, off the court services for her money, and Conor tumbles into a secret erotic affair unlike anything he’s experienced before.

Despite his steamy flings with a woman twice his age, he simultaneously finds himself falling for an artsy, outspoken girl he meets on the beach. With cautious, strategic planning, Conor somehow manages this tangled web—until he makes one final, irreversible mistake.

A dark, explosive literary thriller that brilliantly skewers the elite, Whiting Award winner Teddy Wayne’s unputdownable novel is cinematic, shocking, and a psychological masterpiece.

Teddy Wayne is the author of seven novels; a winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship; and a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker and a former columnist for The New York Times, he has taught at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.