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Learn moreBookseller recommendation
“The narration really helps to solidify the main characters inner turmoil throughout her life. She eventually comes to terms with past events through research and self reflection. Finding herself asking how much she really knows and what outside influences could have warped her view.”
— Alyssa • Brace Books & More
Bookseller recommendation
“Bodie Kane, a film professor and podcaster, returns to teach at the New Hampshire boarding school where she spent four not-so-happy years. Questions arise that lead Bodie to reinvestigate the murder of her high-school roommate. Sex, privilege, power, wrongful convictions, shared-memories, and changing ideas are all explored in this clever novel, filled with memorable characters and lots of things to chew on. ”
— Sarah • A Great Good Place for Books
Bookseller recommendation
“A literary mystery by the award-winning author of The Great Believers. Makkai cleverly tackles relevant topics in this page-turner.”
— Melanie • Bookstore1Sarasota
Bookseller recommendation
“Fresh, current and performed brilliantly by Julia Whelan and JD Jackson! I loved the way the story unfolded, the voice of the unassuming protagonist, and the way she used the "The one where...." and listed a few similar sad, remarkable events to show how repetitively these things happen. Don't sleep on this one! ”
— Melanie Chun • The Well-Read Moose
Bookseller recommendation
“Inviting comparison to Tana French's In the Woods, this literary mystery evokes two very different times in the history of youth as observed by someone who sees absolutely everything... except the one clue that would finally answer the haunting question of her best friend's death. Thinking through conflicts of interest and the terrible realities of our policing and legal systems, sometimes in passages that could be published separately as list poems, Makkai has presented us with a slightly unreliable, sometimes very funny narrator whose two experiences in a remote, isolated community tell us as much about blame, guilt, and 'justice' as cultural phenomena as they do about the murder that readers will listen long into the night to hear solved...”
— Nialle • The Haunted Bookshop
Bookseller recommendation
“A captivating cast of characters and highly provocative plot make this a page turner to the very end. After many years, Bodie returns to visit her boarding school where her roommate died under suspicious circumstances. While there, she is startled to re-examine that event through today’s filters and starts asking new questions about privilege and power, gender, and race. This leads to startling discoveries about people she thought she knew and a suspicion that one of them could be a murderer. A wonderfully modern mystery with contemporary highly resonant themes. ”
— Patience • Underground Books
Bookseller recommendation
“Rebecca Makkai redefines the campus novel for our current times. This was deftly written with such a fresh perspective and clever deconstruction of a murder case, I walked around my apartment fully immersed, book in hand.”
— Kira • Merritt Bookstore
Bookseller recommendation
“It's the one where they rush to judgment and incarcerate a black man on flimsy evidence. It's the one where people knew more than they said. It's the one where a woman is at the mercy of a man. This is a compelling book; a dark window into our culture where assumptions, or proclamations of innocence or guilt, often get in the way of the truth.....and women tend to pay the lion's share of the costs.”
— Kathy • The Well-Read Moose
Bookseller recommendation
“A scorching, compelling read, this is a calling out of violence against women: how it's reported, poorly prosecuted, lightly punished, sensationalized, ignored, held against us, and so deeply ingrained in our culture. A New England prep school is the perfect setting for this collision of podcasts, old secrets hidden deep, racism, sexism, growing pains, and the lenses we have, shed, and change as we grow. Julia Whelan's narration is, as always, phenomenal. I could not stop listening - this is a 10/10 for me.”
— Ashleigh • Wellesley Books
Bookseller recommendation
“If you are a true crime podcast enthusiast like me, you will love this book! It hits all the satisfying notes of a thorough investigation with a great mix of drama and introspection. Makkai masterfully weaves delicate themes - racism, misogyny, the #MeToo movement, prison industrial complex, and the injustice baked into our justice system - into the story with nuance and compassion. I never felt preached to, and in fact, found plenty of room to draw my own conclusions. ”
— Zinna • A Great Good Place for Books
Bookseller recommendation
“I Have Some Questions for You uses a lot of common tropes of psychological thrillers - the true crime podcast, the boarding school murder - yet it never once succumbs to the trappings...It's simultaneously a nuanced look at #metoo, the sensationalization of murdered (white) women in true crime, the corrupt criminal justice system, and the ways in which women's bodies are mistreated and discarded. The opening passage is truly devastating, reading in part: 'Wasn't it the one where she was stabbed in - no. The one where she got in a cab with—different girl. The one where she went to a frat party, the one where he used a stick, the one where he used a hammer, the one where she picked him up from rehab and he - no...It's the one with the swimming pool.' This repetition and cadence is echoed artfully in key passages throughout the book, serving up a gut punch every time. ”
— Rachel • The Book Table
Bookseller recommendation
“It's the one where they rush to judgment and incarcerate a black man on flimsy evidence. It's the one where people knew more than they said. It's the one where a woman is at the mercy of a man. This is a compelling book; a dark window into our culture where assumption, or proclamations of innocence or guilt often get in the way of the truth.....and women tend to pay the lion's share of the costs. It's an excellent audio book.”
— Kathy • The Well-Read Moose
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Named a Best Book of 2023 by The Washington Post, People, USA Today, NPR, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Real Simple, The Boston Globe, CrimeReads and more
“A twisty, immersive whodunit perfect for fans of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.” —People
"Spellbinding." —The New York Times Book Review
"[An] irresistible literary page-turner." —The Boston Globe
The riveting new novel — "part true-crime page-turner, part campus coming-of-age" (San Francisco Chronicle) — from the author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist The Great Believers
A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie.
But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn’t as much of an outsider at Granby as she’d thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.
In I Have Some Questions for You, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.
Rebecca Makkai is the author of the novels I Have Some Questions for You, The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, and the story collection Music for Wartime. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Great Believers received an American Library Association Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors, and was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2018 by The New York Times. A 2022 Guggenheim fellow, Makkai is on the MFA faculties of the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe and Northwestern University, and is the artistic director of StoryStudio Chicago. She lives on the campus of the midwestern boarding school where her husband teaches, and in Vermont.
Reviews
“Thought-provoking, deeply unsettling and undeniably riveting...A fully immersive, addictive whodunit.” —San Francisco Chronicle“A spellbinding work...[Makkai’s] prose is lean yet lush, with short, incantatory chapters and sentences as taut as piano wire.” —New York Times Book Review
“Enthralling...Rich in incident and alive with expressive imagery.” —Wall Street Journal
“A great accomplishment. [I Have Some Questions for You] is at once a campus novel, a piercing reflection on the appeal and ethics of the true crime genre, and a story of Me Too reckoning. It is also the most irresistible literary page-turner I have read in years...Exquisitely suspenseful and enormously entertaining.” —Priscilla Gilman, The Boston Globe
“[I Have Some Questions for You] embraces the intricate plotting and emotional heft that made [Makkai’s] previous novel, The Great Believers, a Pulitzer finalist...Makkai sharply conveys the insidiousness of misogyny...[and] deftly explores how remembrance can melt into reverie...Her patient, evocative character work prevents Omar and Thalia from becoming types...The result is not a book that leers at a discrete and unfathomable act of violence but one that investigates...‘two stolen lives.’” —The New Yorker
“Vastly entertaining . . . both a thickly-plotted, character-driven mystery and a stylishly self-aware novel of ideas . . . in a twist worthy of Poe, Makkai suggests that the truth alone may not set you free or lay spirits to rest.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR's “Fresh Air”
“Bewitching.” —Vanity Fair
“[An] addictive page-turner.” —O Quarterly
“As we race through [I Have Some Questions for You], we’re pulled into playing much the same role as Bodie does: trying to piece together the various stories, eagerly awaiting a verdict . . . [Makkai] leaves us to fill in the gaps, to conjure the lurid details from scraps and rumors—trapped in a quest, her agile book reminds us, that should always leave us second-guessing.” —The Atlantic
“A critique of the true-crime obsession and its inherent voyeurism, refracted through everyone’s new favorite storytelling device, the podcast . . . This sense of collective responsibility is the kind of nuance that doesn’t often emerge from the true-crime content mills. In the world of I Have Some Questions for You, however, there’s an insistent hope that the truth still matters, even when it’s complicated—that the right thing might happen despite the near-impossibility of justice in our society.” —The Nation
“Makkai’s powerhouse novel has all the draw and momentum of the wildly entertaining mystery that it is, but lurking behind the plot is a series of escalating existential questions about trauma, memory, and the ever-shifting terrain of the past . . . Makkai brings to the story a vertiginous sensation of falling again and again into new doubts and desires, one that brings to mind Hitchcock at his best and forces the reader constantly to double back and wonder where the story has taken them, really. I Have Some Questions For You is a smart, sophisticated mystery, crafted with verve.” —CrimeReads, “The Best Crime Novels of the Year (So Far)”
“Somehow, Makkai has managed to pull off a novel that’s simultaneously about the unsettling popularity of true crime, racial inequities in the criminal justice system, post-#MeToo gender politics, 1990s pop nostalgia, and boarding schools, all without ever feeling exploitive or opportunistic. It’s gripping, laugh-out-loud funny, and, most of all, completely honest.” —Publishers Weekly, “The Best Books of 2023”
“A sleekly plotted literary murder mystery…Makkai has written a complicated whodunit fueled by feminist rage as Bodie relentlessly interrogates her past and recalls the countless murders of girls and women whose stories have been all but lost in our collective memory.” —Associated Press
“I Have Some Questions for You asks us to examine many things: high school, the ’90s, privilege, justice, sexual harassment, what we owe the dead. Like the true crime podcasts it’s modeled on, it’s addictive, well told and a little bit unsettling.” —Los Angeles Times
“Gripping...a damn good story...[Makkai turns] abstractions of personal, social, and cultural politics into a practical, deeply felt and occasionally even thrilling reality.” —Star-Tribune
“Makkai combines skilled storytelling with abundant human insight. [I Have Some Questions for You] is so well-plotted and thought-provoking that readers may struggle with conflicting impulses to keep turning the pages to find out what happens next or to stop and think about what it all means.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“[Makkai’s] writing is witty and knife-sharp.” —Condé Nast Traveler
“Hits all the high notes, complete with at least a few revelations you won't see coming.” —Good Housekeeping
“[I Have Some Questions for You] calls into question our relationships to memory and power while also challenging readers to reconsider how we think about race, sex, and class.” —Time
“Makkai has crafted an un-put-downable, captivating boarding school mystery novel with podcasting, teaching, race, divorce, parenting, professional drive, and teen dynamics as undercurrents . . . The writing in this book is absolutely A+ sensational. Pure perfection.” —Zibby Owens, GoodMorningAmerica.com
“Makkai’s sleek, beautifully crafted prose and sharp sense of character make I Have Some Questions for You a pleasure to read even as its twisting plot propels us into darkness.” —Tampa Bay Times
“[A] deft murder-mystery . . . Makkai’s poignant mediation on memory and loss is distinguished by clear prose [and] memorable (and flawed) characters.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Perfectly illustrate[s] the present mood.” —Dallas Voice
“The Secret History meets Serial…[in this] modern campus novel.” —Lit Hub
“Makkai’s triumph of a novel mixes clever storytelling with an exploration of consent, control and memory . . . satisfying and cleverly multi-layered . . . combines the smarts of literary fiction with the thrills of a whodunnit, topped with all the divertissements of the best boarding school-set dramas.” —Financial Times (London)
“[A] skillfully crafted academic mystery.” —PopSugar
“Dark academia meets state of America in this brilliant, original novel.” —Daily Mail
“An enthralling mystery, an interrogation of the past, an entrancing campus novel, I Have Some Questions for You is a propulsive page-turner.” —B&N Reads
“Part boarding school drama, part forensic whodunnit, I Have Some Questions for You is a true literary mystery—haunting and hard to put down.” —Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Candy House
“I’ve been waiting years for a book like this! You will laugh, think, think again, cry and stay up all night finishing it. Unputdownable and unforgettable. Makkai has written the book of the season.” —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less and Less Is Lost
“Both a deeply satisfying crime story and a thoughtful, even provocative, novel of ideas, I Have Some Questions for You narrates one woman’s interrogation of her own past while in turn posing difficult questions directly to its reader: about sex, power, privilege, and the ambient violence of contemporary American life. What a feat.” —Rumaan Alam, New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind
“Some books are so universal that they feel bizarrely specific: I read I Have Some Questions for You as if it was written just for me, but I can't imagine who wouldn't love it. Timely, provocative, nuanced, generous—Rebecca Makkai astonishes once again with the perfect combination of brains and heart.” —Laura Lippmann, author of Dream Girl
“Rebecca Makkai’s extraordinary storytelling gifts are on full display in I Have Some Questions for You, a tense, sharply drawn, and impeccably plotted literary mystery and an urgent, propulsive story of the collision of gender, race, and class in a New England boarding school. I loved walking alongside narrator Bodie Kane—angry, obsessive, struggling with her own traumatic memories—in her imperfect attempts to reckon with a past she longs to leave behind.” —Elizabeth Wetmore, New York Times bestselling author of Valentine
“One of the things I love most about Rebecca Makkai’s writing is her absolutely engaging voice; reading her books feels like hearing a well-told story by a longtime friend. This book—through the voice of its beautifully complex narrator, Bodie Kane—brings readers along on a journey they won't forget.” —Liz Moore, New York Times bestselling author of Long Bright River
“Clever and deeply thoughtful . . . a deliciously complex reckoning . . . [I Have Some Questions for You] is sure to be a hit.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A thought-provoking and delicious tale of life and death and justice that very well may have gone sideways.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“Engrossing . . . a well-plotted indictment of systemic racism and misogyny craftily disguised as a thriller and beautifully constructed to make its points.” —BookPage (starred review)
“A beguiling campus novel . . . Chilled as the deep New England winters during which it takes place and twisty with the slowly found and then suddenly illuminated branches of memory, Makkai's rich, winding story dazzles from cover to cover.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Every year, I look for the novels that truly respect their victims, and think carefully about the tropes of true crime; for 2023, [I Have Some Questions for You] is that novel.” —Molly Odintz, CrimeReads
“Makkai's novel takes on some of the defining issues of its time [...] without battering readers with them. Instead, Makkai carefully winds her themes around her story's scaffolding, which strengthens her masterly plot even more.” —Shelf Awareness
“[Makkai adds] intriguing layers of complication . . . Well plotted, well written, and well designed.” —Kirkus Reviews Expand reviews