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A Novel
by Teddy Wayne
Conor O'Toole has never been anywhere as casually glamorous as Cutters Neck, a gated community near Cape Cod. It's a sweet deal for the summer: free lodging in a guest cottage in exchange for tennis lessons, luxuriously 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. Then a sharp-tongued divorcée appears, offering him double his usual rate. Soon he realizes Catherine is expecting additional, off-the-court services for her money, and Conor tumbles into a secret erotic affair unlike anything he's experienced before.
Despite his steamy flings with a woman twice his age, he simultaneously finds himself falling for the artsy, outspoken girl he met on the beach. Conor somehow finds a way to manage this 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.
"Readers will zoom through Wayne's…bitingly satirical literary thriller." —Booklist (starred review)
"A summer among the Massachusetts elite introduces a young law student to a life and temptations he hadn't imagined...The novelist expertly inserts himself inside Conor's psyche...A novel that puts a fresh twist on getting what you deserve." —Kirkus Reviews
"A page-turning story of sex, power, and money." —Vogue
"Be prepared to fully lose yourself in The Winner—a book I started and then simply couldn't stop reading. Teddy Wayne has written a timely, topical novel that still somehow feels like a classic." —Liz Moore, New York Times bestselling author of Long Bright River
"The Winner is a harrowing romp through the bedrooms of the rich and entitled. Teddy Wayne takes us behind the gates of a super-exclusive community, an enclave of grotesque wealth where everyone gets what they want—with disastrous consequences. A gripping, provocative, and delightfully shocking novel." —Nathan Hill, New York Times bestselling author of Wellness
"The Winner is a lean, careening thrill of a book that kept me awake half the night and away from work the following day. Conor O'Toole's steady embroilment with the wealthy people he teaches tennis to is drawn with exquisite dread. Wayne has a genius for brief observations that reveal whole reams of truth about class, poverty and competition, while also never allowing the hideously compelling story to let up for a moment. Exhilarating, cutting, and funny, The Winner is already one of my favorite books of the year." —Megan Nolan, internationally bestselling author of Acts of Desperation and Ordinary Human Failings
This information about The Winner was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
photo: Kate Greathead
Teddy Wayne is the author of six novels and a winner of a Whiting Writers' Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker and a former columnist for the New York Times, he has taught at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.
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Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering.
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