Fox

‘Chilling’ FINANCIAL TIMES

‘Tom Ripley, eat your heart out’ NPR

‘Eerie, shocking, provoking’ GILLIAN FLYNN

A chilling, captivating novel about the dark secrets that surface after the shocking disappearance of a charming, mercurial teacher at an elite boarding school.

Who is Francis Fox?

A charismatic, young English teacher joins an elite New Jersey boarding school. Francis Fox quickly beguiles many of his students, their parents and his colleagues, while leaving others in the small town wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic.

When Fox disappears and parts of an unidentified body are discovered in nearby woods, the community begins to ask disturbing questions about the charming, mercurial teacher, and who he might really be.

A hypnotic tale of crime, complicity and revenge, Fox is an unsettling portrait of a cunning predator, which illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche.

‘Breathless and febrile … an utterly mesmeric account of how one man’s crimes can affect an entire community’ GUARDIAN

‘Impressive and unsettling’ NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

‘Rich in suspense, diabolical secrets and psychological insight’ ECONOMIST

‘Mesmerising … another masterclass from one of America's greatest writers’ MICHAEL CONNELLY, author of The Lincoln Lawyer

About the author

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of a National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama, the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina, the Cino Del Duca World Prize, and is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the bestsellers Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2024, she won the Raymond Chandler Award, a lifetime achievement honor given to “a master of the thriller and noir literary genre.”