The Brightness

‘I could not put it down’ MADELINE CASH

‘Brilliant and enchanting’ NATHAN HILL

‘So full of life’ NEW YORK TIMES

From the acclaimed author of The Art of Fielding comes a deeply felt story of friendship, art, love and grief, following two young women on the brink of irrevocable change.

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 spiralling toward an unplanned future in New York City. Meanwhile, back at Westish College, her best friend 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 fumble their way out of sleepy Westish College and into adulthood, they find themselves greeted by a world of possibility that will upend their friendship and everything they thought they understood.

The Brightness 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, it confirms Chad Harbach as one of the most accomplished and perceptive writers of our time.

‘A big and generous book, full of lively characters’ THE TIMES

‘Deeply absorbing, vivid, and humane’ LISA HALLIDAY, author of Asymmetry

‘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

‘Beautiful … Passages like [his] are not only a joy to read –they convey something fundamental about people’ NEW YORKER

‘Masterfully captures the dazzling ennui of being in your 20s’MARIE CLAIRE