The Winner
A Novel
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3.5 • 91 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review and Washington Post "Top-10 Thriller of the Year"
A New Yorker, Vogue, Esquire, Elle, and Bookshop.org "Best Book of the Year"
Conor O’Toole has never been anywhere like Cutters Neck, a wealthy gated community near Cape Cod. It’s a sweet deal for the summer: in exchange for tennis lessons, he receives free lodging in a luxurious guest cottage, far from the cramped Yonkers apartment he shares with his diabetic mother.
In this oceanfront paradise, however, new clients prove hard to come by, and Conor has bills to pay. When Catherine, a sharp-tongued divorcée, offers double his usual rate for an arrangement that includes off-the-court services, Conor tumbles into a secret, psychological affair with an older woman, unlike anything he’s experienced before.
Despite the steamy age gap arrangement, he simultaneously finds himself falling for an artsy, outspoken girl he meets on the beach. In this suspense novel of dark secrets, Conor somehow manages his tangled web—until he makes one final, irreversible mistake.
A dark, explosive literary thriller that brilliantly skewers the elite, Whiting Award winner Teddy Wayne’s unputdownable novel is cinematic, shocking, and a psychological masterpiece.
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.
Customer Reviews
Fantastic
One of the best I’ve read in a long time. The suspense is compelling throughout. Highly recommend.
The Winner is remarkable
I can’t remember having this much fun reading a book that painted a world of privilege with such detail and longing. Reminded me of why I liked the movie Match Point.
Unputdownable
Totally riveting.