The Winner
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- CHF 18.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
'A lean, careening thrill … one of my favourite books of the year' Megan Nolan
‘Riveting reading' The Times
'Irresistible … A page-turning story of sex, power, and money' Vogue, Best Books of 2024 So Far
A razor-sharp novel that skewers the life of the uber-rich in the vein of The White Lotus, with shades of The Talented Mr Ripley and The Graduate
Conor comes from nothing, but he knows how to win.
Tennis has taught him how to be relentless. How to work hard and stay patient, even when your opponent has every advantage.
Tennis is what takes Conor to a gated community for the summer, where he can give overpriced lessons to the super-rich. It brings him to Catherine, a bored but intoxicating divorcee twice his age. And to Emily, a girl he might actually love.
As the summer heats up, Conor finds himself not just playing a game, but fighting for survival. Will he put his emotions aside for a greater prize? After all, in tennis, love means nothing.
TOP OF THE LIST ON THE NEW YORK TIMES' BEST THRILLERS OF 2024
‘Wayne’s plot was made to gallop, and it does not disappoint’ New York Times
'Terrific' Wall Street Journal
'Well-paced, smart … A savvy take on sex, money and power … A movie-ready page turner' Washington Post
WHAT READERS ARE SAYING…
'Wow, talk about a can’t-put-down book' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
'Aced it! An absolute page turner!' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
'I had hard time going to sleep at night because I was so engaged and couldn’t stop reading' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
'Where in the world have I been that I have never discovered this writer before??' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
About the author
Teddy Wayne is the winner of a Whiting Writer’s Award and an NEA Writing Fellowship, among other honours. He’s a former New York Times columnist and is a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wayne (The Great Man Theory) disappoints with this underheated thriller about a tennis pro's love triangle. Connor O'Toole promises John Price, a man he met at the Manhattan tennis club where he used to work, free lessons in exchange for summer lodging in Price's Cape Cod guesthouse. Connor struggles to drum up additional clients until Catherine, an attractive divorcée in Price's neighborhood, shows interest. Soon, she offers Connor double his rate to take their sessions to the bedroom. Their arrangement works well enough until Connor meets and falls for Emily, an aspiring writer his own age, and struggles to balance his pursuit of her with Catherine's increasingly possessive demands. Everything comes to a head when a tragic act of violence forces Connor to take desperate measures. Wayne's prose teeters on the precipice between stirring and overwrought ("He awoke for his tennis lesson... under the black cloud of having escaped the action of a nightmare but not its lingering disquietude"), and the pacing is lethally slow, without sufficient atmosphere to offset the lack of action. In the end, this slow burn fails to generate much heat.
