Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

HEX

Rebecca Dinerstein

A breathtaking and hypnotic novel about poison, antidotes, and obsessive love

Nell Barber, an expelled PhD candidate in biological science, is exploring the fine line between poison and antidote, working alone to set a speed record for the detoxification of poisonous plants. Her mentor, Dr. Joan Kallas, is the hero of Nell's heart. Nell frequently finds herself standing in the doorway to Joan's office despite herself, mesmerized by Joan's elegance, success, and spiritual force.

Surrounded by Nell's ex, her best friend, her best friend's boyfriend, and Joan's buffoonish husband, the two scientists are tangled together at the center of a web of illicit relationships, grudges, and obsessions. All six are burdened by desire and ambition, and as they collide on the university campus, their attractions set in motion a domino effect of affairs and heartbreak.

Meanwhile, Nell slowly fills her empty apartment with poisonous plants to study, and she begins to keep a series of notebooks, all dedicated to Joan. She logs her research and how she spends her days, but the notebooks ultimately become a painstaking map of love. In a dazzling and unforgettable voice, Rebecca Dinerstein Knight has written a spellbinding novel of emotional and intellectual intensity.

Rebecca Dinerstein Knight is the author of the novel and screenplay The Sunlit Night, and a bilingual English-Norwegian collection of poems, Lofoten. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Yorker online, among others . More about Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

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Book Published 2020-03-31 by Viking USA

Comments

A young academic develops an unhealthy fixation on her adviser in this arresting novel of obsession from Dinerstein Knight (The Sunlit Night). Nell Barber is expelled from her PhD program in botany at Columbia University, along with the rest of her lab members, after their colleague Rachel Simons dies from exposure to poisonous plants. Nell breaks up with her medievalist boyfriend Tom, gets a job at a bar, and concentrates on completing Rachel's dangerous work in her apartment to capture the attention of former adviser Joan Kallas, with whom she is obsessed. While Joan tries to steer Nell away from the dangerous project, Joan starts up an affair with Tom, and Nell's best friend, the gorgeous, high-achieving Mishti, sleeps with Joan's husband. The narrative takes the form of entries in what is supposed to be Nell's scientific notebook (which are addressed to Joan), in which Nell discusses the main players' love affairs and tries to reach conclusions about her would-be mentor. After the details of the affairs emerge at a small holiday party at Joan's home, Nell loses her chance at an invitation to join Joan's new research project. Nell's intensity and the hypnotic, second-person prose convincingly render the protagonist's bewitched, self-destructive state. Readers who liked I Love Dick and want something more lurid will appreciate this. Read more...

As precHEX is a book for those who feel adrift and solitary, for those who feel overwhelmed by themselves. Ultimately, it's a story about harnessing what is out of controland learning that perhaps the only way to control a poisonous thing is to first embrace it. Chicago Review of Books

Strange and delightful The past half-decade has seen a spike in oddball novels about brainy women in various states of crisis; think of Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, or Halle Butler's The New Me, or Danzy Senna's New People. These three novels succeed, in part, because their prose and protagonists are leached of joy. Dinerstein Knight inverts that strategy. She shoves joy at Nell, and makes Nell greedy for it How could a reader or a botany professor not be charmed? NPR.org

Bloomsbury (Spring 2020)

As precise as any scientific observation and far more tantalizing.Vogue

Knight writes in a distinctive, addictive, and poetic style in which every sentence provokes and nothing is predictable.Booklist