Hex

Strange and delightful … How could a reader - or a botany professor - not be charmed?

NPR.org

Academics tie themselves up into a pretzel of betrayal and desire in Rebecca Dinerstein Knight’s propulsive second book, which reads a tiny bit like AS Byatt after dark … This is a bold and highly charged book that makes entertainment seem like not such a bad word

LITHUB, Most Anticipated Books of 2020

Hex is the sort of novel that almost has its own smell – humid and loamy, like a body after a morning spent bent over a garden patch. It’s about Nell Barber, a recently expelled Ph.D. student secretly running her own experiments on poisonous botanicals in her apartment and vigorously lusting after her buttoned-up adviser and mentor. Sex practically pulses out of Nell as she fails her way into adulthood in this botanically entwined work of early-adult dissatisfaction

VULTURE, 32 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2020

Swift-moving, sardonic … Dinerstein Knight paints a withering portrait of this web of toxic romances, and of the excesses of academia, while illustrating how both the heart and the mind can be broken and reshaped by changing circumstances

NEW YORKER

As precise as any scientific observation and far more tantalizing

VOGUE

Hex reads like a botanist's cross-breeding of The Secret History and Department of Speculation, full of brilliant and bodily obsession. Rebecca Dinerstein Knight is both a scientist and a magician, and she conjures this beautiful spell of a novel with total control

EMMA STRAUB

Hex is a book for those who feel adrift and solitary, for those who feel overwhelmed by themselves. Ultimately, it’s a story about harnessing what is out of control - and learning that perhaps the only way to control a poisonous thing is to first embrace it

CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS

A book that examines our natural and absolutely astounding reactions to each other. The language of this novel is so finely tailored, so elegant yet organic, so absorbing that it takes the reader a moment to realize that this is not just a deliciously engaging tale of what it is like to be social and sexual, but that this writing is an actual incantation in itself. It is a beautiful, spooky spell that divides and processes our innate potential for poison or pleasure

JENNY SLATE

Hex is sexy, unhinged, revelatory, so smart it gives the reader whiplash. It works on you like the poisonous plants that wind through the storyline, until you’re as obsessed and intoxicated as the vivid characters that make up this love hexagon gone fascinatingly and beautifully wrong. I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun reading a book or was so impressed by the wizardry of the language

JULIE BUNTIN, author of Marlena

Hex is a gem of a book: sharp and exquisite. Dinerstein Knight writes about women’s obsession with devastating wisdom, insight, and humor. It is pure pleasure to be under her spell

JULIA PIERPONT, author of Among the Ten Thousand Things

Hex is neon-bright and guided by a fierce, scintillating interest in the innermost chambers of the human heart, where melancholic and bright humors mingle together. In every line you hear the voice of a writer who knows how to lead you expertly into the place where the story is most alive: spooky, shifty, darkly funny, and delectable in every way

ALEXANDRA KLEEMAN

Offbeat yet entirely precise; original and universal. Hex is a nut with sweet meat and a poison shell, at once disarming and quietly devastating. This is a book for anyone who’s ever felt adrift, or felt alone, or loved someone out of reach, or all the above

RACHEL KHONG

Nell’s intensity and the hypnotic, second-person prose convincingly render the protagonist’s bewitched, self-destructive state. Readers who liked I Love Dick and want something more lurid will appreciate this

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

A joyfully deranged pleasure

KIRKUS

A spellbinding novel of emotional and intellectual intensity

FANTASTIC FICTION