-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
A Novel
From the brilliant Kate Christensen, winner of the PEN/Faulkner award for The Great Man, comes a compelling, searing, funny novel about women, sex, power, and self-reckoning.
Ever since her father broke her heart when she was nine, Julia Heimdahl has tried to be good company for bad men: a jovial drinking companion, an easygoing, witty non-complainer, one of the boys. Now a literary novelist in late middle age and late mid-career, she is at a moment of crisis, although she doesn't know it yet.
The novel takes place over the course of a weekend-long book festival at Baldwin College, which happens to be Julia's alma mater, where she has come to promote her recently published memoir. She's been placed on a panel with a fellow memoirist named Ellis Blackwell, a man so outrageously flirtatious and fawningly flattering, Julia is almost too disarmed to recognize how dangerous he is.
Interweaving excerpts from Julia's memoir with her encounters with important people from her past—the woman she was in love with in college, her old New York mentor, her male editor, her literary nemesis, a former graduate student—Good Company examines what it really means to be "good company" as Julia faces her demons and comes to terms with what she really wants from sex, life, and work.
"In probing misogyny's legacy and the uneasy intimacies among women, Christensen delivers a bracing meditation on trust, aging, and the wreckage violent men leave in their wake." —Library Journal (starred review)
"Christensen's adeptness at character development and psychological analysis shines...An astute addition to a decade of discussions about consent and predation." —Kirkus Reviews
"[N]uanced if slow-paced...Julia's complex characterization will stay with readers." —Publishers Weekly
"Christensen executes a ninja takedown of toxic literary hypocrisy and an evisceration of the endless damage wrought by misogyny and sexual predation and violence." —Booklist
This information about Good Company 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 © Ronnie Farley
Kate Christensen is the author of eight novels, most recently Welcome Home, Stranger. Her fourth novel, The Great Man, won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has also published two food-centric memoirs, Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose, which won the 2016 Maine Literary Award for Memoir. Her essays, reviews, and short pieces have appeared in a wide variety of publications and anthologies. She lives with her husband and their two dogs in Taos, New Mexico.
Author Interview
Link to Kate Christensen's Website
Name Pronunciation
Kate Christensen: Chris-ten-sen
If you liked Good Company, try these:
by Miranda July
Published 2025
The New York Times bestselling author returns with an irreverently sexy, tender, hilarious and surprising novel about a woman upending her life
by Sandra Newman
Published 2024
An imaginative, feminist, and brilliantly relevant-to-today retelling of Orwell's 1984, from the point of view of Winston Smith's lover, Julia, by critically acclaimed novelist Sandra Newman.
by Claire Keegan
Published 2023
From Booker Prize Finalist and bestselling author of "pitch perfect" (Boston Globe) Small Things Like These, comes a triptych of stories about love, lust, betrayal, and the ever-intriguing interchanges between women and men.
A library is a temple unabridged with priceless treasure...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
