Kate Walbert

A "tense, taut, and thrilling" (Marie Claire) novel about a teenage girl, a predatory teacher, and a school's complicity from the highly acclaimed, bestselling National Book Award finalist and author of A Short History of Women—"riveting, terrifying, exactly the book for our times" (Ann Patchett).
They were on a lark, three teenaged girls speeding across the greens at night on a "borrowed" golf cart, drunk. The cart crashes...

The novel opens in England in 1915, at the deathbed of Dorothy Townsend, a suffragist and one of the first women to integrate Cambridge University. Her decision to starve herself for the cause informs and echoes in the later, overlapping narratives of her descendants. Among them are her daughter Evie, who becomes a professor of chemistry at Barnard College in the middle of the century and never marries, and her granddaughter Dorothy Townsend Barrett,...

"They were on a lark, three teenaged girls speeding across the greens on a "borrowed" golf cart, at night, drunk. The cart crashes and one of the girls lands violently in the rough, killed instantly. The driver, Jo, flees the hometown that has turned against her and enrolls at a prestigious boarding school. Her past weighs on her. She is responsible for the death of her best friend. She has tipped her parents' rocky marriage into demise. She is ready...