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The Brightness

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What to expect

From the bestselling author of literary sensation The Art of Fielding comes an urgent, deeply felt story of friendship, art, love, and grief, following two young women on the brink of irrevocable change.

Parties and weddings, messy hookups and marred friendships, art and love and grief—The Brightness follows the electric, chaotic, everything-can-happen lives of Pella and her best friend, Irma, as they fumble their way out of sleepy, Midwestern Westish College and into a larger world that will upend their connection and everything they thought they understood about their own place within it.

At 27, Pella’s life looks settled: she’s a recent college grad, 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 spiraling toward an unplanned future in New York City. Meanwhile, back at Westish College, 21-year-old Irma’s involvement with a politically charged prank—one that has roiled both the campus and the world beyond—threatens to derail her brilliant future. As Irma and Pella cycle through possibilities and identities, both navigate the heights and depths of passion and ambition, and the incalculable wages of love and loss.

In stunning scenes and spectacular characters—each drawn with an almost superhuman vividness and humanity—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 deep-seeing writers of our time.

Critics Review

“A good book is propulsive, you can’t put it down, etc. A really good book fosters scarcity and you want to put it down as frequently as you can to live in the narrative longer. But a great book makes you feel a sort of frustration with the author that they wrote it before you. This is a good, really good, and great book. It captures a. what it was like to be a girl in college in 2016, which I was but imagine Chad wasn’t, which makes it all the more impressive, b. the complicated nature of female friendship, and c. the wonderful excruciating confusion of growing up. I could not put it down, except when I had to in order to savor it."—Madeline Cash, author of Lost Lambs

“As in his acclaimed debut, Harbach immerses readers in the world of Westish, but he broadens his scope, plunging his characters into new environments and broaching topics such as love and talent and literature, as well as campus sexual assault, feminism, the fraught politics of victimhood, and the volatile media landscape that complicates all of these. Apt evocations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest abound. While this novel can certainly be enjoyed independent of its predecessor, those who’ve read the first book will more fully appreciate the continued growth and dilemmas of Pella, Mike, and Owen (the Skrimmer makes appearances, too), to say nothing of the clever metafictional twist Harbach pulls off via Owen’s novel, which is titled—well, take a guess. Brilliant, poignant, and absorbing.”

—Kirkus (starred)

“Fifteen years after popping one into the bleachers with his best-selling debut, The Art of Fielding, Harbach returns with a sophomore effort that finds two Midwestern best friends reckoning with the messy realities of young adulthood.”

—New York Times

“With prose that is characteristically assured, detailed, and wise, [The Brightness] is sure to be the Big Cozy Read of the autumn.”

—Lit Hub, Most Anticipated Books of the Year
Author Chad Harbach
Narrator Helen Laser
Duration 21 hours and 30 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781668623442
Format Audiobook
Publisher Hachette Audio
Genre Contemporary romance, Fiction: general and literary, Narrative theme: Coming of age
Availability US

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