The Amateur
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 20 Aug 2026
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- 95,00 kr
Publisher Description
'Sharply funny, beautifully told and so moving on the way life can upend itself in a single moment. I adored it’ CLARE LESLIE HALL, author of BROKEN COUNTRY
'Impossible to put down' GILLIAN McALLISTER, author of WRONG PLACE WRONG TIME
1978. In the sleepy New York suburb of Tallmadge, eighteen-year-old Mira Winston is beguiling, talented, and full of youthful recklessness. She spends her summer perfecting her swing at her parents’ country club – and continuing her long-running affair with her father’s golf buddy, a married man twice her age.
Then, one August afternoon, a freak accident occurs, and Mira’s classmate Kenny is killed. In the days and years that follow, the events of that day become inextricably tied to the choices she has made – with devastating, unpredictable consequences for her family, her neighbours and friends, and Mira herself.
She is forced to ask: what happens when one small moment – the swing of a golf club, a stolen kiss, a hastily written note – changes the course of an entire life?
Mesmerizing and darkly funny, The Amateur unravels against a backdrop of white-picket-fenced streets, university dorm rooms, smoke-filled restaurants, and elegant country clubs. Turning a sharp eye to the American middle class, it is a hypnotic tale of power, morality, and the weight of blame.
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.
