The Plot is the sort of book you wish you'd written yourself.
The plot is so ingenious. Superficially it's about a writer whose career is on a downturn and who is reduced to making a living teaching creative writing courses. He steals a brilliant idea for a plot from one of his students after hearing that the student has died before he had a chance to use it himself.
The book is a huge success, but then the writer starts receiving online messages from someone who professes to know what he's done. It's a page turner but it also says a lot about the writing process and how authors function.
The book is far more than just a thriller. It's a long time since I was so absorbed by a novel that I couldn't bear to drag myself away.
** NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! ** The Tonight Show Summer Reads Winner ** A New York Times Notable Book of 2021 **
"Insanely readable." ―Stephen King
Hailed as "breathtakingly suspenseful," Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot is a propulsive read about a story too good not to steal, and the writer who steals it.
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,…
What I loved about this book is that Boyd does what I would never do. He writes as if it were a journal in which the writer, like the reader, doesn't know what will happen next. It's like going on a journey without a set plan.
There are beautifully idiosyncratic descriptions of now famous, then unknown literary figures – Evelyn Waugh, Hemingway, etc. – told in a natural 'course of conversation,' not a name-dropping way, and catty asides shedding light on characters like Virginia Woolf and her racism. Boyd is very good at describing feelings and attitudes and the way they change over time, especially the self-doubt, insecurity, arrogance, and self-obsession of youth.
Any Human Heart is William's Boyd's classic, bestselling novel, now available as a Penguin Essential for the first time.
Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary, but Logan Mountstuart's - lived from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century - contains more than its fair share of both. As a writer who finds inspiration with Hemingway in Paris and Virginia Woolf in London, as a spy recruited by Ian Fleming and betrayed in the war and as an art-dealer in '60s New York, Logan mixes with the movers and shakers of his times. But as a son, friend,…
A book that zips with energy and sharp writing. The narrator's husband has been asked to relinquish his post as professor at the college where they both teach, after 7 former students claim he 'abused his power.'
I suspect the author belongs to my generation of undergraduates. Like her central character, I revered my professors – male & female – they knew more than I did and I wanted as much of them and their knowledge as I could get. Like her, I recognised that lust was what united most of them but like her I never felt diminished by the exchange.
I wouldn't have dreamt of carping years later that I'd been the victim of an abuse of power when, as the narrator says, 'power is the reason they (the women) desired him in the first place.'
A provocative, razor-sharp, and timely novel about a beloved English professor facing a slew of accusations against her husband from his former students - a situation that becomes more complicated when she herself develops an obsession of her own . . .
When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me.
And so we meet our deliciously incisive narrator: a popular English professor whose husband, a charismatic professor at the same small liberal arts college, is under investigation for his inappropriate relationships with his former students. The couple have long had…
For twenty-five years, the legendary Marthe has been Pierre Bonnard's companion and muse. His new model Renée, lovely and captivating, thinks it's time her rival stepped aside. But Marthe isn't giving up her place in history without a fight.
