Only Children

From one of the most original and formidable voices in modern fiction comes a darkly funny and deeply unsettling novel about loneliness, longing, and the stories people tell themselves about love

After a violent incident involving his father, eighteen-year-old Simon Mallory has been sentenced to six months of court-ordered exile in Dully-by-the-Sea. Left restless and alone in the luxury apartment his parents have rented for him, he spends his days observing strangers, making prank phone calls, and searching for a way to alleviate an emptiness he cannot name. His only familiar human contact is his mother, who visits often enough to assure herself that he’s doing fine.

His social worker, Patricia Harmon, is also adrift, trapped in the aftermath of a reckless entanglement with a former client, a relationship she continues to interpret through the distorting lens of romantic love. When mysterious messages begin appearing on her answering machine—messages of heartache, longing, and forgiveness—the line between fantasy and reality begins to fade, forcing her to confront the possibility that love may not be as redemptive as she’d hoped.

And as a long, hot summer unfolds, the boundaries between care and cruelty and devotion and self-deception blur. Harnessing the pleasures of soap opera—illicit passions, reversals, impossible longings—toward something stranger and more profound, Only Children is about people trapped inside their own narratives, unable to distinguish between what they feel, what they desire, and what is true.

Only Children is Ottessa Moshfegh at her most tender and expansive: a novel about the seductions of love, the consolations of fantasy, and the terrible cost of mistaking one for the other.