Carousel Court: A Novel

Finalist for the 2016 Kirkus Prize for Fiction

An Indie Next Selection • One of USA TODAY’s “Hottest Books” • One of New York magazine’s “8 Books You Need to Read”

“A fearless novel about a family and a society on the brink…Harrowing but, against all odds, ultimately tender.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“Fast…Foreboding…This couple will stop at nothing to keep their house and marriage afloat….McGinniss spins an edgy tale, often laced with a reporter’s eye for the little details that make characters pop.” —The Washington Post

“Riveting…McGinniss is poised to become one of our sharpest observers of life in America at the start of the twenty-first century.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Here is one of the most engrossing, unnerving, and exhilarating novels in recent memory. It comes to us from Joe McGinniss Jr., whose first book, The Delivery Man, was a national bestseller that critics hailed as “searing” (The New York Times Book Review), “compelling” (The Washington Post), and “reminiscent of Joan Didion” (Janet Fitch). Now, after spending the better part of a decade at work, McGinniss returns with another viscerally absorbing look at the seductive—and destructive—cutting edge of modern life, this time through the lens of marriage.

Carousel Court is the story of Nick and Phoebe Maguire, a young couple who move cross-country to Southern California in search of a fresh start for themselves and their infant son following a trauma. But they arrive at the worst possible economic time. Instead of landing in a beachside property, Nick and Phoebe find themselves cemented into the dark heart of foreclosure alley, surrounded by neighbors being drowned by their underwater homes who set fire to their belongings, flee in the dead of night, and eye one another with suspicion while keeping shotguns by their beds. Trapped, broke, and increasingly desperate, Nick and Phoebe each devise their own plan to claw their way back into the middle class and beyond. Hatched under one roof, their two separate, secret agendas will inevitably collide.

Combining the excruciating honesty of Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road with the social urgency of George Packer’s The Unwinding, Carousel Court is a blistering and unforgettable vision of contemporary life. It has the ambition of our most serious literary work and the soul of a thriller, managing to be simultaneously sexy, scary, and powerfully moving. Most of all, it offers an unflinching portrait of modern marriage in a nation scarred by vanished jobs, abandoned homes, psychotropic cure-alls, infidelity via iPhone, and ruthless choices. No matter what kind of relationship you are in, it will leave you simultaneously gutted and grateful for your own good fortune—if perhaps curious what your partner is really up to on that electronic device across the living room.