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Cartwheel: A Novel
by Jennifer duBois
Hardcover : 384 pages
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Slate • Cosmopolitan • Salon • BuzzFeed • BookPage
Written with the riveting storytelling of authors like Emma Donoghue, Adam Johnson, Ann Patchett, and Curtis Sittenfeld, Cartwheel is a suspenseful and haunting novel of an American ...
Introduction
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
Slate • Cosmopolitan • Salon • BuzzFeed • BookPage
Written with the riveting storytelling of authors like Emma Donoghue, Adam Johnson, Ann Patchett, and Curtis Sittenfeld, Cartwheel is a suspenseful and haunting novel of an American foreign exchange student arrested for murder, and a father trying to hold his family together.
When Lily Hayes arrives in Buenos Aires for her semester abroad, she is enchanted by everything she encounters: the colorful buildings, the street food, the handsome, elusive man next door. Her studious roommate Katy is a bit of a bore, but Lily didn’t come to Argentina to hang out with other Americans.
Five weeks later, Katy is found brutally murdered in their shared home, and Lily is the prime suspect. But who is Lily Hayes? It depends on who’s asking. As the case takes shape—revealing deceptions, secrets, and suspicious DNA—Lily appears alternately sinister and guileless through the eyes of those around her: the media, her family, the man who loves her and the man who seeks her conviction. With mordant wit and keen emotional insight, Cartwheel offers a prismatic investigation of the ways we decide what to see—and to believe—in one another and ourselves.
In Cartwheel, duBois delivers a novel of propulsive psychological suspense and rare moral nuance. No two readers will agree who Lily is and what happened to her roommate. Cartwheel will keep you guessing until the final page, and its questions about how well we really know ourselves will linger well beyond.
Praise for Cartwheel
“A smart, literary thriller [for] fans of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.”—The Huffington Post
“Psychologically astute . . . DuBois hits [the] larger sadness just right and dispenses with all the salacious details you can readily find elsewhere. . . . The writing in Cartwheel is a pleasure—electric, fine-tuned, intelligent, conflicted. The novel is engrossing, and its portraiture hits delightfully and necessarily close to home.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice)
“Marvelous . . . a gripping tale . . . Every sentence crackles with wit and vision. Every page casts a spell.”—Maggie Shipstead, author of Seating Arrangements
“[You’ll] break your own record of pages read per minute as you tear through this book.”—Marie Claire
“Jennifer duBois is destined for great things.”—Cosmopolitan
“A convincing, compelling tale . . . The story plays out in all its well-told complexity.”—New York Daily News
“[A] gripping, gorgeously written novel . . . The emotional intelligence in Cartwheel is so sharp it’s almost ruthless—a tabloid tragedy elevated to high art. [Grade:] A-”—Entertainment Weekly
“Sure-footed and psychologically calibrated . . . As the pages fly, the reader hardly notices that duBois has stretched the genre of the criminal procedural.”—Newsday
“Provocative, meaningful and suspenseful.”—Chicago Tribune
“[Jennifer duBois is] heir to some of the great novelists of the past, writers who caught the inner lives of their characters and rendered them on the page in beautiful, studied prose.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Editorial Review
Essay by Author Jennifer duBois
In some of its themes, Cartwheel draws inspiration from the case of Amanda Knox, the American foreign exchange student accused, convicted, and acquitted of murdering her roommate in Italy. I was fascinated by the idea of writing about a fictional character who serves as a blank slate onto which an array of interpretationsâ??often inflected by issues of class and privilege, gender and religion, American entitlement and anti-American resentmentâ??tend to be projected. The fictional Lily Hayes shares these broad and nebulous qualities with Amanda Knox; their similarities lie in the contradictory but confident judgments they animate in others.
The eponymous cartwheel serves as a good example of the novelâ??s intention, as well as its relationship to reality. In the book, some view Lily Hayesâ??s interrogation room gymnastics as callous, others as benign, others as suspicious. These divided perceptions were initially inspired by the response to the cartwheel Amanda Knox was widely reported to have done during her interrogationâ??a cartwheel that, we now know, never actually occurred. This episode, I think, illustrates some of the central questions I wanted to explore in this novelâ??questions about how we decide what to believe, and what to keep believingâ??while also demonstrating part of why I needed a totally fictional realm to do this.
In contemplating the possibility that this book could be mistaken as a narrative aboutâ??and judgment onâ??real-life people and events, Iâ??ve come to appreciate how entirely my view of writing and reading fiction is based on a single moral premise: that the act of imagining the experiences of fictional people develops our sense of empathy, as well as our sense of humility, in regarding the experiences of real ones. To me, the fictional barrier around the characters in this book isnâ??t just a necessary prerequisite for trying (or even wanting) to write a novel about the fallibility of perceptionâ??itâ??s also fundamental to my notion of fictionâ??s ethical possibilities in the world. And so it is as a person, even more than as an author, that I ask readers to have no doubt as to whose story this is. In the real universe is a girl who never did a cartwheel. This novel is the story of a girl who did.
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