Description

“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

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. 

About the Author

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.

Praise For…

A Lit Hub "Most Anticipated Book" * A Vogue "Best Book So Far" —

"A page-turning story of sex, power, and money." — Vogue

“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

"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

"A riveting novel about how to have the rich and eat them, too. Sexy, breathless, and brutal.”  — Julia May Jonas, author of Vladimir

"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