The Amateur
A Novel
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Midwives and The Flight Attendant: When a young woman, a golf prodigy, kills a caddy with a stray ball at the country club, the investigation of this freak accident reveals a dark and shocking tale of secret affairs, predatory men, and a teenager on trial.
1978: It is the first Thursday in August and temperatures are flirting with ninety when Mira Winston, eighteen years old, drives a golf ball from her tee toward the practice net near the clubhouse and caddy shack. The golf ball, weighing 1.6 ounces, tears through the net, traveling 150 miles per hour, and slams, with sickening force, into the temple of a high school junior named Kenny Foster, rupturing an artery and unleashing a torrent of blood. Kenny brings his hand to the side of his head, then topples onto his side. He’s dead before the ambulance even arrives.
In the wake of this terrible accident—and everyone, at first, agrees it was an accident—Mira looks for comfort in all the wrong places: In her lover, Theo Catton, a married man three decades her senior. In her mother, a well-kept woman with secrets of her own. In the dead caddy’s little sisters, girls bewildered by grief. But when the investigators look more closely at the torn net, when a detective recalls Mira’s history of recklessness, and when Kenny’s father spies Mira with her married lover, the affluent and mannered community turns on this once-promising young woman. A gripping story that takes the reader from the sun-soaked greens of a tony Westchester country club to the fluorescent-lit stand of a county courtroom, The Amateur asks: What happens when one small moment—a swing, a ball, a piece of string—changes the course of an entire life?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A fluke accident reveals a cascade of deeply uncomfortable truths in this smart and incisive novel. It’s 1978 when 18-year-old golf prodigy Mira Winston hits a ball that punches right through the practice net and hits a 17-year-old caddy named Kenny in the head, killing him almost instantly. In her fictional memoir, we follow Mira as she reflects on that pivotal period. Weeks away from attending Yale when the accident occurs, Mira is privileged, hyperconfident, and hotly temperamental—more than enough for her small town to turn on her. The revelation of Mira’s so-called affair with a 47-year-old man only makes things worse, even though it began when she was just 15. Chris Bohjalian (The Flight Attendant) masterfully weaves all of these threads into an immersive portrait of the affluent suburbs, replete with casual misogyny and socially acceptable pill and alcohol addictions. Even as the seismic effect of Kenny’s death builds to a high-tension court case, Bohjalian makes it impossible to ignore the fault lines of class and gender that have been there all along.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A freak accident at a Westchester County, N.Y., golf course derails a young woman's life in this powerful domestic thriller from Bohjalian (The Jackal's Mistress). In August 1978, fiery 18-year-old LPGA hopeful Mira Winston is driving balls into the Tallmadge Country Club's practice net when a shot blasts through the mesh and kills 17-year-old caddy Kenneth Foster. Mira's mother urges her to focus on her impending start at Yale, where she'll almost certainly make the golf team; a distraught Mira, however, wants nothing more to do with golf or, by association, college. Mira becomes convinced Kenny's death is karmic punishment for her multiyear affair with a married 40-something man—particularly after Kenny's father discovers the relationship and tells Mira's parents. But when Mira's temper and alleged moral turpitude make her a suspect in the practice net's apparent sabotage, she fears she has only begun to pay. Styled as an unflinchingly candid memoir written by Mira decades after the fact, Bohjalian's latest dazzles as it devastates. Plentiful foreshadowing ramps up tension and keeps the momentum high while Mira turns over weighty subjects—sexual abuse, post-traumatic stress, familial dysfunction—with grace and wry humor. It's a masterpiece. Agents: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneide.
