Loner (Simon & Schuster)
From the award-winning author of The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, a propulsive novel about a meek Harvard freshman who becomes dangerously infatuated with a classmate.
David Federman has never felt appreciated. An academically gifted yet painfully forgettable member of his New Jersey high school class, the withdrawn, mild-mannered freshman arrives at Harvard fully expecting to be embraced by a new tribe of high-achieving peers. But, initially, his social prospects seem unlikely to change, sentencing him to a lifetime of anonymity. Then he meets Veronica Morgan Wells. Struck by her beauty, wit, and sophisticated Manhattan upbringing, David falls feverishly in love. Determined to win her attention and an invite into her glamorous world, he begins compromising his moral standards for this one, great shot at happiness. But both Veronica and David, it turns out, are not exactly as they seem.
Loner turns the traditional campus novel on its head as it explores gender politics and class. It is a stunning and timely literary achievement from one of the rising stars of American fiction.
Praise for Loner
“Like a novel of manners distorted by a twisted funhouse mirror, Teddy Wayne’s Loner moves with wit and stealth and merciless deliberation towards increasingly brutal psychic terrain. Reading it, I found myself amused and then—with creeping force—afraid, repulsed, and ultimately unwilling to put it down." —Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams and The Gin Closet
“Teddy Wayne perfectly conjures the mind of a keenly observant, socially ambitious, and utterly heartless college student. Yet no matter what outlandish things David does, I couldn't help but root for him--until the book's gut-punch ending." —Adelle Waldman, New York Times bestselling author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P
Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels The Love Song of Jonny Valentine and Kapitoil. A regular contributor to The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and McSweeney's, he is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. He has taught at Columbia University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the Yale Writers' Conference. He lives in New York.
Photo by Kate Greathead
