Synopses & Reviews
Passion, infidelity, social climbing, cross-dressing, 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 that eighteenth-century adventuress, Lady Charlotte Wilcox, she ought to be content. Instead, she is horrified to find herself profoundly in love with Oliver, the son of her oldest 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 themselves in an awkward triangle. As a risky charade brings their affairs to a climax, all three of them learn that love is seldom straightforward, but 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' beloved opera, Der Rosenkavalier, and a mesmerizing novel of our own time and place.
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"Korelitz...persuasively conveys the depth of her paramours' emotions and perceptively gauges their motivations in an insightful, sensitive, and poignant romance." Booklist
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"A deftly plotted narrative...elegant and melancholy yet surprisingly optimistic, warmed by full-bodied characterizations and expert delineations of complex emotions." Kirkus Reviews
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"This is a great love story tender, sophisticated, perverse, drenched in feeling." Edmund White
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"The White Rose is a delight. A novel of manners and love, it is droll, sexy, and very clever." Scott Turow
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"A deeply satisfying read, the kind we have missed and longed for...every sentence sparkles and every dilemma entertains." Elinor Lipman
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"...[T]his work is a heady bloom, ripe with unlikely yet rewarding elements of romance." Library Journal
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"Neat and intricate without extravagance, The White Rose is a rare modern novel which both obeys and upsets novelistic conventions, and the result is as enjoyable as it is technically excellent." Providence Journal
About the Author
Jean Hanff Korelitz lives in Princeton, NJ, with her husband, the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, and their children. She is the author of the novels The Sabbathday River and A Jury of Her Peers, as well as Interference Powder, a novel for children.