The Amateur
A Novel
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The Amateur
Pre-order Now for £15.55
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Narrated by:
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By:
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Chris Bohjalian
About this listen
1978: It is the first Thursday in August and temperatures are flirting with ninety when Mira Winston, eighteen years old, drives a golf ball from her tee toward the practice net near the clubhouse and caddy shack. The golf ball, weighing 1.6 ounces, tears through the net, traveling 150 miles per hour, and slams, with sickening force, into the temple of a high school junior named Kenny Foster, rupturing an artery and unleashing a torrent of blood. Kenny brings his hand to the side of his head, then topples onto his side. He’s dead before the ambulance even arrives.
In the wake of this terrible accident—and everyone, at first, agrees it was an accident—Mira looks for comfort in all the wrong places: In her lover, Theo Catton, a married man three decades her senior. In her mother, a well-kept woman with secrets of her own. In the dead caddy’s little sisters, girls bewildered by grief. But when the investigators look more closely at the torn net, when a detective recalls Mira’s history of recklessness, and when Kenny’s father spies Mira with her married lover, the affluent and mannered community turns on this once-promising young woman. A gripping story that takes the reader from the sun-soaked greens of a tony Westchester country club to the fluorescent-lit stand of a county courtroom, The Amateur asks: What happens when one small moment—a swing, a ball, a piece of string—changes the course of an entire life?
Critic reviews
Chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of "The Novels Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026.”
"The Amateur is a joyous novel with an unforgettable narrator who will break your heart. It is sharply funny, beautifully told and so moving on the way life can upend itself in a single moment. I adored it."
—Clare Leslie Hall, New York Times bestselling author of Broken Country
"A gripping literary thriller in which a young woman’s future hangs in the balance after a chance accident at an elite country club exposes secret affairs and class divides. Impossible to put down.”
—Gillian McAllister, New York Times bestselling author of Caller Unknown and Wrong Place, Wrong Time
“Irresistible… a marvelous 11th-hour twist and a satisfying denouement lie ahead. It’s hard to think of any reason not to call this a perfect novel: a hole in one.”
—Kirkus (Starred Review)
“Intrepid . . . Timely and empathic.”
—Booklist (Starred Review)
"The Amateur is a joyous novel with an unforgettable narrator who will break your heart. It is sharply funny, beautifully told and so moving on the way life can upend itself in a single moment. I adored it."
—Clare Leslie Hall, New York Times bestselling author of Broken Country
"A gripping literary thriller in which a young woman’s future hangs in the balance after a chance accident at an elite country club exposes secret affairs and class divides. Impossible to put down.”
—Gillian McAllister, New York Times bestselling author of Caller Unknown and Wrong Place, Wrong Time
“Irresistible… a marvelous 11th-hour twist and a satisfying denouement lie ahead. It’s hard to think of any reason not to call this a perfect novel: a hole in one.”
—Kirkus (Starred Review)
“Intrepid . . . Timely and empathic.”
—Booklist (Starred Review)
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