Synopses & Reviews
In 1993, Austin Wright, a novelist and professor at the University of Cincinnati, published Tony and Susan to stunning acclaim. But the book never quite found the wide readership it deserved, and Wright died in 2003 at the age of eighty, relatively unrecognized. Now, more than two decades since its original publication, this brilliant novel has inspired the major motion picture Nocturnal Animals.
Fifteen years ago, Susan Morrow left her first husband, Edward Sheffield, an unpublished writer. Now, she's enduring middle class suburbia as a doctor's wife, when out of the blue she receives a package containing the manuscript of her ex-husband's first novel. He writes asking her to read the book; she was always his best critic, he says.
As Susan reads, she is drawn into the fictional life of Tony Hastings, a math professor driving his family to their summer house in Maine. And as we read with her, we too become lost in Sheffield's thriller. As the Hastings' ordinary, civilized lives are disastrously, violently sent off course, Susan is plunged back into the past, forced to confront the darkness that inhabits her, and driven to name the fear that gnaws at her future and will change her life.
Tony and Susan is a lost masterpiece of American fiction. It is a dazzling, eerie, riveting novel about fear and regret, blood and revenge, marriage and creativity. It is simply one of a kind.
Review
"Marvelously written – the last thing you would expect in a story of blood and revenge. Beautiful." Saul Bellow
Review
"Rarely does a novel pull you in so quickly and so deeply. If there is such a thing as a literary thriller, this is it. Beautifully written, perfectly paced, impressively clever, and ultimately shocking in a way you never see coming. Tony and Susan stays with you long after you've put it down." Nelson DeMille
Review
"An elegant meditation on the process of reading, the relationship between reading and writing, the dance between writer and reader...beautifully wrought, troubling, and hard to forget."
Boston Globe
Review
"A page-turner of a literary thriller....Not since Cormac McCarthy's The Road have I been so gripped and unsettled by a piece of fiction." Sarah Waters in the Guardian (UK), author of The Little Stranger
Review
"Absolutely terrifying, beautiful, and appalling. Parts of it shocked me, and I am not easily shocked." Ruth Rendell
Review
"A masterpiece....A brilliant, brainy novel full of thrills...It would be easy to say that his critical intelligence dominates Tony and Susan, but Wright is a wonderful storyteller, a wonderful novelist...Tony and Susan makes one hunger to read more of Wright's work." Chicago Sun-Times
Review
"My favorite novel of 2010 would have been my favorite novel of 1993 – if only I had known about it...Wright died at the age of eighty; in 2010 Tony and Susan returns to print as his stunning literary legacy." Min Jin Lee in the Times (London), author of Free Food for Millionaires
About the Author
Austin Wright was born in New York in 1922. He was a novelist and academic, for many years Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Cincinnati. He lived with his wife and daughters in Cincinnati, and died in 2003 at the age of eighty.