I often remember novels by where I was when I read them. The Great Believers was an odd choice for a sun-drenched trip to Greece: a story of two friends ravaged by the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. As I lay on my Turkish towel in the islands, with my kids swimming with my husband in the crystalline waters, I remember thinking: I need to get out of these pages and join in the fun that is my own life.
But author Rebecca Makkai’s writing was so seductive that I kept slipping into her characters. She uses emotion to turn pages, rather than suspense or well-trodden tropes. Now her fifth novel I Have Some Questions For You releases on February 21, which coincidentally is my son, Harper’s 13th birthday. (I will wait until after the festivities to begin the book so it doesn’t distract.)
The novel, billed as a literary psychological thriller, already hits all the right notes for me: boarding school, New Hampshire, secrets, murder. Pair this with Makkai’s masterful, emotive writing and I think we’re going to have another winner on our hands.
Synopsis of I Have Some Questions for You:
A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past — the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the 1995 murder of a classmate, Thalia Keith. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are the subject of intense fascination online, Bodie prefers — needs — to let sleeping dogs lie.
But when The Granby School invites her back to teach a two-week course, Bodie finds herself inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn’t as much of an outsider at Granby as she’d thought — if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.
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This sounds fascinating! I hadn't heard of Rebecca Makkai before but I love literary psychological thrillers.