Andrea Barrett is the author of the novels The Middle Kingdom and The Voyage of the Narwhal and the National Book Award winning story collection Ship Fever. Her much anticipated new novel is set in the fall of 1916, on the politically charged eve of the American entry into World War I. Yet in Tamarack Lake, an isolated community for tubercular patients, politics are played out in gossip and rumor that lead to a terrible betrayal.

A PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and “a writer of near-miraculous perfection” (New York Times), Claire Messud’s first three books, When the World Was Steady, The Hunters, and The Last Life, were all New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Messud is known for her deft ability to evoke the lives and mores of radically different characters. Her latest novel is a stinging portrait of life among Manhattan’s junior intelligentsia .