by Chad Harbach
First published 2026
Pella arrives at Block Island for her friend Owen's destination wedding with her life mapped out. She's 27, fresh from college, and engaged to her longtime boyfriend Mike. Then the wedding weekend explodes everything she thought she knew about herself and her future. Her carefully arranged life crumbles as past and present crash together in ways she never saw coming. Suddenly single and adrift, Pella flees to New York City. The city offers both brilliant possibilities and brutal realities as she tries to figure out who she actually is. She experiments with different versions of herself: artist, bartender, scholar, lover. Each identity feels both genuine and false as she cycles through jobs, relationships, and dreams. The city forces her to see herself through new eyes while she grapples with fundamental questions about her identity and purpose. Pella rides the peaks and valleys of desire and ambition while learning the true cost of love and heartbreak. Her twenties stretch before her like an open road, but she feels the weight of permanent decisions beginning to narrow her choices. Harbach captures the electric uncertainty of young adulthood when everything still seems possible even as real life starts to close certain doors forever.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, contemporary, adult, adult-fiction, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, introspective, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: coming-of-age, reinvention, second-chance, self-discovery
Setting: Block Island, New York City, Midwest
Period: 21st-century
672 pages · Hardcover · Little, Brown and Company