Pet is so cunningly written, the plot so enticing, the insight into the power a charismatic teacher can wield over young students so strong that I was hooked from the first page.
It’s “beautifully written,” but there’s nothing highfalutin about it. It’s a true psychological thriller, as suspenseful as they come, featuring children manipulated into twisted, dangerous relationships with each other. It’s also “literary,” and I put that in quotes because “literary” is a word that makes my heart sink. To me, it suggests a book that is somehow fancy, chilly, too oblique to draw the reader in. Pet may be “literary,” but it’s also irresistible, with characters we care about and yearn to help. It’s a book that goes by too fast, a book to read twice.
Like every other girl in her class, twelve-year-old Justine is drawn to her glamorous, charismatic new teacher, and longs to be her pet. However, when a thief begins to target the school, Justine's sense that something isn't quite right grows ever stronger. With each twist of the plot, this gripping story of deception and the corrosive power of guilt takes a yet darker turn. Young as she is, Justine must decide where her loyalties lie.
Set in New Zealand in 1984 and 2014, and probing themes of racism and misogyny, Pet is an elegant and chilling psychological thriller by the…
A big fat novel full of sly, rueful, knowing humor, great, unpredictable characters, and most surprising plot turns, Mr. Texas made me laugh (which I love), breathe fast, and stay up reading late into the night.
Long as it is, it sped by, and I missed it after I was done. It’s also rich with the deep knowledge Wright, a distinguished New Yorker writer and longtime Texas resident, has of the state: the ranchers, the legislators, the families, the hard land left behind after the oil wells it once supported have disappeared.
We root for the maverick protagonist and hold our breath when he risks defeat. In an epilogue, Wright describes the very long road this book had to publication. What luck that it finally got there.
From the Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author, a hilarious, sharply drawn send-up of local politics • A novel about a dark-horse candidate who risks his personal happiness for a career in the Texas House of Representatives • "Required reading in these politically turbulent times.”—Susan Orlean, author of On Animals
“A rollicking satire . . ."— Paul Begala, The New York Times Book Review
Sonny Lamb is an affable, if floundering, rancher with the unfortunate habit of becoming a punchline in his Texas hometown. Most recently, to everyone’s headshaking amusement, he bought his own bull at an auction. But when…
Usually I’m not much for novels set in the criminal underworld, so I opened A Man of Lies with some skepticism.
Then I read the first paragraph: “So here’s the short version of things: I did something stupid, some people got hurt, and I’m about to try something far worse.” Who could stop reading after that? Not me. I zipped through the book, happy to live in the company of this tough, worldly, bluntly frank narrator pursuing a goal motivated, we soon learn, by love.
I also wondered about the background of the author. Nothing in the jacket flap biography suggests a con man with a gun. So how does he know all this stuff without having lived it? Who is this guy?
When his lover is killed by their mob boss, a hardened criminal insider decides to pursue one last elaborate heist in an effort to rid himself of his underground lifestyle for good.
Barrett Rye has always been told he can be only one thing in life: an enforcer. He's a seven-foot wall of muscle and the most effective collector in the largest criminal enterprise in the Midwest. After he realizes he wants more out of life than hurting people, he and his mob accountant boyfriend, Mickey, decide to steal enough money from their boss to disappear and start over. But…
Must Read Well is game of cat-and-mouse between Liz, a young scholar, and a once-famous, now forgotten feminist novelist. Drowning in debt, desperate to finish her dissertation on feminist writers, Liz searches Craigslist for a place to live and stumbles on a room for rent to someone willing to read aloud to the sight-impaired landlady. Liz soon deduces that the sight-impaired woman is Anne Taussig Weil, author of the blockbuster The Vengeance of Catherine Clark--the very woman whose refusal to meet with her has stalled her dissertation. Lying about her identity, Liz applies, gets the room, and discovers she will be reading from journals that record Anne’s passionate, disastrous, secret affair with a celebrated pianist. Will she write about it? The game is on.
