VERY NICE

A young teacher of literature from Pakistan turns an East Coast suburbian family upside down. This upmarket social comedy comes from a promising new voice in American fiction on the rise.

Zahid Azzam is a once-heralded Pakistani-American novelist and professor with a bond to his family in Pakistan and a standard poodle re-named Posey.

Rachel Klein is an inexperienced college student and aspiring writer. Zahid Azzam is her teacher.

Becca Klein, Rachel's mother, is a beautiful and newly separated Connecticut middle school teacher with beautiful home and an open soul.

Jonathan Klein is a wealthy banker, just separated from Becca - but why?

Khloe Taylor is a biracial MBA graduate and aspiring banker who shares an apartment with Zahid and is looking for romantic adventures.

Dermansky takes these characters and interweaves them in a stew of sex, secrets, and betrayal. Navigating between the worlds of high finance and creative writing, this novel takes on everything - divorce, rich people, the suburbs, writers, bankers, sexual harassment and abuse, race, sexual identity, school shooters, and poodles. Nothing is safe, and the result is a subversive, darkly hilarious and amazingly readable satire about the way we live now.

Marcy Dermansky is the author of the novels TWINS (William Morrow, 2005), BAD MARIE (HarperPerennial 2010), and THE RED CAR (Norton, 2016). Her books have been widely acclaimed and beloved by everyone from The New York Times Book Review to The Today Show to luminaries like Roxane Gay, Emma Straub, and Maria Semple.