The Brightness

‘I could not put it down’ MADELINE CASH

‘Brilliant and enchanting’ NATHAN HILL

‘Deeply absorbing, vivid, and humane’ LISA HALLIDAY

From the acclaimed author of The Art of Fielding comes an urgent, deeply felt story of friendship, art, love and grief, following two young women as they fumble their way into a larger world that won't stop changing.

At 27, Pella’s life looks settled: she’s a recent college graduate, engaged to Mike, her longtime boyfriend, and helping her friend Owen pull off his own destination wedding on Block Island. But over that wild wedding weekend, Pella’s past and present collide spectacularly, blowing up her plans and sending her spiralling toward an unplanned future in New York City.

There, in a city that’s equal parts glittering opportunity and cutthroat grit, Pella is forced to see herself in constantly changing lights as she wrestles with who she is and what she will become. As she cycles through possibilities and identities – is she an artist? A bartender? A scholar, a lover, a wife? – Pella navigates the heights and depths of passion and ambition, and the incalculable wages of love and loss.

In stunning scenes and spectacular characters, Chad Harbach captures that specific, shimmering anxiety of your twenties when life still feels wide open, even as hard and irreversible choices start closing in. Energetic, funny, and deeply human, this much-anticipated follow-up to The Art of Fielding confirms Chad Harbach as one of the most accomplished and perceptive writers of our time.

‘Captures the complicated nature of female friendship, and the wonderful excruciating confusion of growing up’ MADELINE CASH, author of Lost Lambs

‘A monumental campus novel, full of smart and mercurial characters who feel as real as your own roommates’ TOM PERROTTA, author of Ghost Town

© 2026 Fourth Estate (Audiobook): 9780008536893

Release date

Audiobook: 27 October 2026