Throughout his career, Chris Bohjalian has earned a reputation for writing novels that examine some of the most important issues of our time. With Midwives, he explored the literal and metaphoric place of birth in our culture. In The Buffalo Soldier, he introduced us to one of contemporary literature's most beloved foster children. And in Before You Know Kindness, he plumbed animal rights, gun control, and what it means to be a parent.

Chris Bohjalian's riveting fiction keeps us awake deep into the night. As The New York Times has said, "Few writers can manipulate a plot with Bohjalian's grace and power." Now he is back with an ambitious new novel that travels between Jay Gatsby's Long Island and rural New England, between the Roaring Twenties and the twenty-first century.

When college sophomore Laurel Estabrook is attacked while riding her bicycle through Vermont's back roads, her life is forever changed. Formerly outgoing, Laurel withdraws into her photography and begins to work at a homeless shelter. There she meets Bobbie Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness and a box of photographs that he won't let anyone see. When Bobbie dies suddenly, Laurel discovers that he was telling the truth: before he was homeless, Bobbie Crocker was a successful photographer who had indeed worked with such legends as Chuck Berry, Robert Frost, and Eartha Kitt.

As Laurel's fascination with Bobbie's former life begins to merge into obsession, she becomes convinced that some of his photographs reveal a deeply hidden, dark family secret. Her search for the truth will lead her further from her old life--and into a cat-and-mouse game with pursuers who claim they want to save her.

In this spellbinding literary thriller, rich with complex and compelling characters--including Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan--Chris Bohjalian takes readers on his most intriguing, most haunting, and most unforgettable journey yet.

From the Hardcover edition.

Prologue Laurel Estabrook was nearly raped the fall of her sophomore year of college. Quite likely she was nearly murdered that autumn. This was no date-rape disaster with a handsome, entitled UVM frat boy after the two of them had spent too much time flirting beside the bulbous steel of a beer keg; this was one of those violent, sinister attacks involving masked men--yes, men, plural, and they actually were wearing wool ski masks that shielded all but their eyes and the snarling rifts of their mouths--that one presumes only happens to other women in distant states. To victims whose faces appear on the morning news programs, and whose devastated, forever-wrecked mothers are interviewed by strikingly beautiful anchorwomen. She was biking on a wooded dirt road twenty miles northeast of the college in a town with a name that was both ominous and oxy-moronic: Underhill. In all fairness, the girl did not find the name Underhill menacing before she was assaulted. But she also did not return there for any reason in the years after the attack. It was somewhere around six-thirty on a Sunday evening, and this was the third Sunday in a row that she had packed her well-traveled mountain bike into the back of her roommate Talia's station wagon and driven to Underhill to ride for miles and miles along the logging roads that snaked through the nearby forest. At the time, it struck her as beautiful country: a fairy-tale wood more Lewis than Grimm, the maples not yet the color of claret. It was all new growth, a third-generation tangle of maple and oak and ash, the remnants of stone walls still visible in the understory not far from the paths. It was nothing like the Long Island suburbs where she had grown up, a world of expensive homes with manicured lawns only blocks from a long neon-lit swath of fast-food restaurants, foreign car dealers, and weight-loss clinics in strip malls.

After the attack, of course, her memories of that patch of Vermont woods were transformed, just as the name of the nearby town gained a different, darker resonance. Later, when she recalled those roads and hills-- some seeming too steep to bike, but bike them she did-- she would think instead of the washboard ruts that had jangled her body and her overriding sense that the great canopy of leaves from the trees shielded too much of the view and made the woods too thick to be pretty. Sometimes, even many years later, when she would be trying to fight her way to sleep through the flurries of wakefulness, she would see those woods after the leaves had fallen, and visualize only the long finger grips of the skeletal birches.

By six-thirty that evening the sun had just about set and the air was growing moist and chilly. But she wasn't worried about the dark because she had parked her friend's wagon in a gravel pull-off beside a paved road that was no more than three miles distant. There was a house beside the pull-off with a single window above an attached garage, a Cyclops visage in shingle and glass. She would be there in ten or fifteen minutes, and as she rode she was aware of the thick-lipped whistle of the breeze in the trees. She was wearing a pair of black bike shorts and a jersey with an image of a yellow tequila bottle that looked phosphorescent printed on the front. She didn't feel especially vulnerable. She felt, if anything, lithe and athletic and strong. She was nineteen.

Then a brown van passed her. Not a minivan, a real van. The sort of van that, when harmless, is filled with plumbing and electrical supplies, and when not harmless is packed with the deviant accoutrements of serial rapists and violent killers. Its only windows were small portholes high above the rear...

 

Psychological thriller, crime novel and "what-if" sequel to The Great Gatsby--with significant twists. Schizophrenic, yes, and alcoholic--but Bobbie Crocker isn't your stereotypical street person. Bohjalian (Before You Know Kindness, 2004, etc.) invests him with mystery; when he dies in Burlington, Vt., he leaves behind photographs from 1960s issues of Life magazine. Eartha Kitt, Dick Van Dyke, Muddy Waters--they're celebrity shots he took, combined with elegant evocations of Jazz Age Long Island. Laurel Estabrook, social worker at Crocker's shelter, discovers something else among them: a snapshot of herself riding a bike, just as she had, seven years before, when savaged by two thugs. The attack scarring her, she'd retreated into PTSD therapy, affairs with comforting, if noncommittal, father figures and a life less of ambition than service. Crocker's photos provide Laurel clues to their strangely interconnected pasts--and she sets out to decode them. Had the homeless man actually been to the manor born, son of Tom and Daisy Buchanan of fabled West Egg? His sister denies it, having spent most of her 70 years trying to whitewash her parents'reputation--Tom's brutality and Daisy's suspicious involvement in the car crash that killed one of his lovers. Had those wealthy, morally bankrupt parents caused Bobbie's "double bind,"

 

"The Double Bind races toward a conclusion that boasts a shocking twist. . .This elegantly crafted tale is well worth delving into."

 

"Chris Bohjalian's The Double Bind is simply one of the best written, most compelling, artfully woven novels to grace bookshelves in years."

 

"Bohjalian is a master of literary suspense."

 

"Critics are giving Bohjalian...high marks for The Double Bind."

 

"[An] imaginatively crafted novel."

 

"Great fiction...un-put-downable."

 

"This is top-notch Bohjalian fiction."

 

"A page-turner with a wicked twist at the end."

 

"[An] artfully crafted, terrifying new novel.... Bohjalian has written a literary thriller."

 

"Truth may be stranger than fiction, but this book makes the case that truth is also more valuable as a source of inspiration."

 

"A literate thriller about homelessness, random brutality and an obsession with characters from Fitzgerald's 'Great Gatsby.'"

 

"[Bohjalian writes] the sorts of books people stay awake all night to finish, and The Double Bind exerts that same hypnotic tug."

 

"Clearly the most viscerally exciting of Bohjalian's normally cerebral books."

 

"This psychological thriller...offers a chilling depiction of the ways we choose to remember as well as what we forget."

 

"An intriguing mix of fact and fiction. . .powerful. . .a shocker"

 

"Bohjalian fills The Double Bind with gripping twists and turns."

 

"Part mystery and part psychological exploration...will certainly be interesting book-group fodder."

 

"Part psychological mystery and part literary puzzle." --The Record (Bergen County, NJ) "The suspense takes a twist at the end, which flips the story upside down."

 

CHRIS BOHJALIAN is the critically acclaimed author of ten novels, including Midwives (a Publishers Weekly Best Book and an Oprah's Book Club selection) and his most recent New York Times bestseller, Before You Know Kindness. His work has been translated into eighteen languages and published in twenty-one countries. He lives with his wife and daughter in Vermont.

From the Hardcover...