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The Brightness

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What to expect

‘I could not put it down’ MADELINE CASH

‘Brilliant and enchanting’ NATHAN HILL

‘Deeply absorbing, vivid, and humane’ LISA HALLIDAY

From the acclaimed author of The Art of Fielding comes an urgent, deeply felt story of friendship, art, love and grief, following two young women as they fumble their way into a larger world that won't stop changing.

At 27, Pella’s life looks settled: she’s a recent college graduate, engaged to Mike, her longtime boyfriend, and helping her friend Owen pull off his own destination wedding on Block Island. But over that wild wedding weekend, Pella’s past and present collide spectacularly, blowing up her plans and sending her spiralling toward an unplanned future in New York City.

There, in a city that’s equal parts glittering opportunity and cutthroat grit, Pella is forced to see herself in constantly changing lights as she wrestles with who she is and what she will become. As she cycles through possibilities and identities – is she an artist? A bartender? A scholar, a lover, a wife? – Pella navigates the heights and depths of passion and ambition, and the incalculable wages of love and loss.

In stunning scenes and spectacular characters, Chad Harbach captures that specific, shimmering anxiety of your twenties when life still feels wide open, even as hard and irreversible choices start closing in. Energetic, funny, and deeply human, this much-anticipated follow-up to The Art of Fielding confirms Chad Harbach as one of the most accomplished and perceptive writers of our time.

‘Captures the complicated nature of female friendship, and the wonderful excruciating confusion of growing up’ MADELINE CASH, author of Lost Lambs

‘A monumental campus novel, full of smart and mercurial characters who feel as real as your own roommates’ TOM PERROTTA, author of Ghost Town

Critics Review

‘Captures the complicated nature of female friendship, and the wonderful excruciating confusion of growing up … I could not put it down, except when I had to in order to savour it’ Madeline Cash, author of Lost Lambs
‘A monumental campus novel, full of smart and mercurial characters who feel as real as your own roommates … combines the ambitious scope and narrative vitality of a nineteenth century novel with a sharp and compassionate eye for the way we live now’ Tom Perrotta, author of Ghost Town
‘Perfectly captures what it’s like to be in your twenties and facing down life’s enormous question: Who am I going to be? … A brilliant and enchanting story about friendship, love, ambition, and growing up’ Nathan Hill, author of Wellness
‘A deeply absorbing, vivid, and humane novel about the world as it is, the world as it could be, and the roles that provocation and imagination might play in closing the gap’ Lisa Halliday, author of Asymmetry
‘A wonder of a novel. I wanted to live in it … [Harbach] has that rare, tremendous gift of assuring you you’re in the hands of an absolute master. I was besotted from the first page’ Laurie Frankel, author of Enormous Wings
‘A sophomore effort that finds two Midwestern best friends reckoning with the messy realities of young adulthood’ New York Times
‘Apt evocations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest abound … Brilliant, poignant, and absorbing’ Kirkus
‘With prose that is characteristically assured, detailed and wise, [The Brightness] is sure to be the Big Cozy Read of the autumn’ Lit Hub
Author Chad Harbach
Narrator Helen Laser
Duration 22 hours and 11 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9780008536893
Format Audiobook
Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
Genre Contemporary lifestyle fiction, Humorous fiction, Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Coming of age, Narrative theme: Love and relationships
Availability AU, GB, IE

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