The Brightness

“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.”

“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.”

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