Loner A Novel

Summary: The critically acclaimed and highly anticipated novel from award-winning writer Teddy Wayne, an unsettling and impossible-to-put-down work that is, "powerful" (Fresh Air), "engrossing" (People), and "complex and necessary" (Salon).David Federman has never felt appreciated. One of the most painfully forgettable members of his New Jersey high school class—despite his being the only senior accepted to Harvard—shy, witty David arrives in Cambridge fully expecting to embrace, and be embraced by, a new tribe of like-minded peers. But at first, beyond the friendly advances of a plain-looking girl named Sara, his social status seems devastatingly unlikely to change. Then Veronica Morgan Wells enters his life. Instantly infatuated, struck by both her beauty and her brains, David falls feverishly in love with the woman he sees as a charismatic Upper East Side goddess. Determined to stop at nothing to win her attention and an invite into her glamorous world, David begins compromising his own academic and moral standards, tossing everything aside for this one, great chance at happiness. But neither Veronica nor David, it turns out, are exactly as they seem... In Loner, Teddy Wayne's "writing is spiky and electric...[like] the early work of Jeffrey Eugenides" (The New York Times Book Review), offering great "evidence of a rising talent" (The Wall Street Journal). This is a darkly comic, "deft, involving" (Chicago Tribune) portrayal of psychosexual obsession that explores just what we're capable of when our greatest enemies turn out to be ourselves.

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