NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An “enthralling” ( Los Angeles Times ) and “remarkably engrossing” ( The
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice) novel of literary and psychological suspense
about the dark secrets that surface after the shocking disappearance of a charismatic
mercurial teacher at an elite boarding school—by legendary author Joyce Carol Oates “Eerie
shocking provoking and beautifully written.”—Gillian Flynn “I found it mesmerizing front to
back.”—Michael Connelly “I can’t remember the last time I read something so (darkly
disconcertingly) addictive.”—Rebecca Makkai “An extraordinary novel . . . unlike any other
mystery I’ve read.”—Joseph Finder “Tom Ripley eat your heart out.”—NPR “A classic
psychological suspense.”— People “A dark daring plunge into literary suspense . . . Oates
dissects the predator-prey dynamic with merciless precision.”— The Seattle Times A
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR) A MOST
ANTICIPATED BOOK: The New York Times The Boston Globe Seattle Times Vulture Esquire
Publishers Weekly Lit Hub AV Club AARP Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new
to the idyllic Langhorne Academy Fox beguiles many of his students their parents and his
colleagues at the elite boarding school while leaving others wondering where he came from and
why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a
pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods
the entire community including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy begins to ask
disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be. A hypnotic galloping tale
of crime and complicity revenge and restitution victim vs. predator Joyce Carol Oates’s Fox
illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about
justice and the response evil demands. A character as magnetically diabolical as Patricia
Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert Francis Fox enchants and
manipulates nearly everyone around him until at last he meets someone he can’t outfox. Written
in Oates’s trademark intimate sweeping style and interweaving multiple points of view Fox is
a triumph of craftsmanship and artistry a novel as profound as it is propulsive as moving as
it is full of mystery.
