LUCKIEST GIRL ALIVE

In a riveting debut novel that reads like part Emily Giffin, part Gillian Flynn, a young woman is determined to create the perfect life—husband, home, and career—until a violent incident from her past threatens to unravel everything and expose her most shocking secret of all.

Twenty-eight-year-old New Yorker Ani FaNelli seems to have it all: she’s a rising star at The Women’s Magazine, impossibly fit, perfectly groomed, and about to marry Luke Harrison, a handsome blueblood. But behind that veneer of perfection lies a vulnerability that Ani holds close and buries deep—a very violent, and public, trauma from her past has left her constantly trying to reinvent herself, and only she knows how far she would go to keep her secrets safe.

When a documentary producer invites Ani to tell her side of the chilling incident that took place when she was a teenager at the prestigious Bradley School, she hopes it will be an opportunity for public vindication. Armed with the trappings of success—expensive clothes, high-powered byline, a massive engagement ring—she is determined to silence the whispers of suspicion and blame from her past, and prove once and for all how far she’s come since Bradley. She’ll even let them film her lavish wedding on Nantucket, the final step in her transformation.

But perfection doesn’t come without cost. As the wedding and filming converge, Ani’s meticulously crafted facade begins to buckle and crack—until an explosive revelation offers her a final chance at redemption, even as it rocks her picture-perfect world.

Equal parts glitz and darkness, and with a singular voice and twisting plot, Luckiest Girl Alive reads like Sex & the City—if Carrie Bradshaw had a closet full of skeletons instead of shoes. In Ani FaNelli, Jessica Knoll has created a complex and vulnerable heroine who you’ll be rooting for to the very last page.

Jessica Knoll has been a senior editor at Cosmopolitan, where her byline appeared more than 200 times in five years. Now the articles editor at SELF, her writing and editing covers relationships, sex, and psychological well-being. Jessica grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and graduated from The Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She lives in New York City with her husband and her imaginary bulldog puppy, Bernard.