Diana

A resonant, insightful, and deliciously entertaining novel of ambition and obsession from Julia May Jonas, the author of the “whip-smart and darkly funny” (People) “virtuoso debut” (Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air) Vladimir.

“I watched my friend Diana win a prestigious theatrical acting award while drinking myself into oblivion in the den of my parents’ home where I was living with my children after being abandoned by my husband who had, at one time, been her lover.”

Thus begins Diana, a story of competition, performance, and the perils of fate as told by our narrator, Annie—a forty-two-year-old woman attempting to reconcile her former promise with her current devastation, made all the more bewildering by the rise of her estranged best friend.

Annie and Diana meet at a prestigious drama school. They become inseparable—flaunting their brilliance, beauty, and youth while navigating artistry, love affairs, and the precarities of their cutthroat profession. But as their circumstances shift and their paths narrow, their friendship starts to falter. And when Diana commits the ultimate betrayal, Annie comes undone.

Exiled to the suburbs, prey to the needs of her family, and at a loss to find a way forward, Annie struggles to understand the decisions and misdeeds that lead Diana to the heights of glory while she is left behind. And just when it seems she might make peace with her lot, she recklessly seizes at a misguided opportunity to even the score.

Emotionally acute and deeply funny, Diana is a furiously compelling story of art, passion, motherhood, friendship, work, and selfhood, that explores how to lose while others win, and if the game itself may already be rigged.