White Rose
Passion, infidelity, social climbing, and one very special white rose weave a seductive narrative in this intelligent and tender novel.
At forty-eight, Marian Kahn, a professor of history at Columbia, has reached a comfortable perch. Married, wealthy, and the famed discoverer of the eighteenth-century adventuress, Lady Charlotte Wilcox, she ought to be content. Instead, she is horrified to find herself profoundly in love with twenty-six-year-old Oliver, the son of her eldest friend. When Marian's cousin, the snobbish Barton, announces his engagement to Sophie, a graduate student in Marian's department, Marian, Oliver, and Sophie find their lives woefully entangled, and their hearts turned in unfamiliar directions. All three of them will learn that love may seldom be straightforward, but it's always a gift.
From the West Village to the Upper East Side, from the Hamptons to Millbrook, The White Rose is at once a nuanced and affectionate reimagining of Strauss's beloved opera, Der Rosenkavalier, and a mesmerizing novel of our own time and place.
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Jean Hanff Korelitz
Jean Hanff Korelitz has built a reputation as a writer who knows how to draw readers into the uneasy space between truth and deception, where ambition collides with morality and secrets refuse to stay buried. Her novels often unfold like literary puzzles, inviting readers to question not just her characters’ choices but their own assumptions about storytelling itself.
Born and raised in New York, Korelitz studied at Dartmouth College and Clare College, Cambridge, before settling into a career that bridges both literary and popular fiction. While she has written across genres, her breakout novel The Plot brought her widespread recognition in 2021. The book followed a struggling writer who takes a student’s idea and spins it into a bestselling novel, only to find himself haunted by accusations of theft. Its success introduced many readers to her sharp eye for character and her ability to turn the act of writing itself into a suspense story.
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