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A Novel
by Teddy Wayne
Award-winning author Teddy Wayne follows the tremendous critical success of his breakout sensation The Winner—a New York Times Top Ten Thriller of the Year—with another seductively twisty page-turner about the explosive impact of a beautiful Norwegian au pair on a celebrated novelist and his wife.
Steven Hammer was once an acclaimed literary star. Now, his career is floundering, his marriage to a high-powered woman is crumbling, and the only bright spot in his life is Astrid, the Norwegian au pair who cares for their children—and reveres his neglected novels. But what begins as a secret infatuation soon spirals into a scandal that makes them both infamous.
As a headline-grabbing trial captivates the world with a salacious story of sex, power, and betrayal, Steven must confront the wreckage he's created—and the deeper insecurities that fueled it. Is Astrid an innocent young woman caught up in a case beyond her control, or a calculating femme fatale? And how far will he go, driven by desperation and obsession, for her professed love?
With inexorable momentum and sly, lucid prose, Teddy Wayne's The Au Pair is an electrifying literary thriller about desire, deception, and the unraveling of a man as he grapples with his fading relevance—where nothing is as it seems, and the truth may be more fantastical than the lies we tell ourselves.
"A sly, unsettling hybrid of social satire and domestic thriller." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Wayne spins his familiar premise into an intricate look at the perils of seeking admiration. Readers will be hard-pressed to put this down." —Publishers Weekly
"I tore through The Au Pair in a single day, and lamented only that it wasn't twice as long. I hunger for literary thrillers with clean, lovely sentences that are also generous with the goods: narrative and erotic tension, plot twists, and a sly sense of humor about their characters. Teddy Wayne delivered, yet again, on all counts." —Melissa Febos, bestselling author of Girlhood and The Dry Season
This information about The Au Pair 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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