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The Plot

A Novel

The Book Series: Book #1

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Narrator Kirby Heyborne

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Length 10 hours 55 minutes

Language English

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Bookseller recommendation

“I devoured this smart, suspenseful novel about a failed novelist who reignites his career with a stolen plot and gains fame and notoriety. Korelitz’s depiction of the book world is a treat for those of us in it, but her twisty, psychologically astute plotting will hold broad appeal.”
— Becky Dayton • The Vermont Book Shop

Bookseller recommendation

“A novel within a novel, a plot within a plot, a very realistic and informative look at authors, how they write, how they think, and how they try to be faithful to what they believe: that a good story must be told, even if it is not really yours to tell. Jake Finch Bonner genuinely believes that a story idea can not be stolen–after all there are only so many plots and they have been told repeatedly by many authors. It is how you tell the story, the words you use and the feelings you bring forth that make it the authors. However, when Jake, after years of struggling to get another book published writes a huge bestseller there is someone out in the world who does not think an author has the right to write anyone else’s story. What starts out as a slow but methodical look at Jake’s approach to being an author, his dreams, his aspirations and his beliefs, turns into a fast-paced story about what a person will do to keep their secrets and to punish someone who they think stole a story that he had no right to write.”
— Nancy • Fiction Addiction

Summary
About the author

"I think Jean Hanff Korelitz’s THE PLOT is one of the best novels I’ve ever read about writers and writing. It’s also insanely readable and terrifying. The suspense quotient is through the roof...It’s remarkable." -- Stephen King

Hailed as "breathtakingly suspenseful," Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot is a propulsive audiobook about a story too good not to steal, and the writer who steals it.

Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he’s teaching in a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what’s left of his self-respect; he hasn’t written—let alone published—anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student, announces he doesn’t need Jake’s help because the plot of his book in progress is a sure thing, Jake is prepared to dismiss the boast as typical amateur narcissism. But then . . . he hears the plot.

Jake returns to the downward trajectory of his own career and braces himself for the supernova publication of Evan Parker’s first novel: but it never comes. When he discovers that his former student has died, presumably without ever completing his book, Jake does what any self-respecting writer would do with a story like that—a story that absolutely needs to be told.

In a few short years, all of Evan Parker’s predictions have come true, but Jake is the author enjoying the wave. He is wealthy, famous, praised and read all over the world. But at the height of his glorious new life, an e-mail arrives, the first salvo in a terrifying, anonymous campaign: You are a thief, it says.

As Jake struggles to understand his antagonist and hide the truth from his readers and his publishers, he begins to learn more about his late student, and what he discovers both amazes and terrifies him. Who was Evan Parker, and how did he get the idea for his “sure thing” of a novel? What is the real story behind the plot, and who stole it from whom?

A Macmillan Audio production from Celadon Books

"Narrator Kirby Heyborne maintains the brisk pace and firm tension of what promises to be one of the summer's most talked about suspense novels." -- AudioFile Magazine

"Kirby Heyborne’s vocal dynamics convey emotion, and his no-nonsense delivery has the versatility and ease of a comfortable pair of jeans in this tale that examines moral obligations." -- Library Journal

Fiction Mystery & Thriller

Jean Hanff Korelitz is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Plot, The Latecomer, You Should Have Known (which aired on HBO as The Undoing, starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant, and Donald Sutherland), Admission (adapted as a film starring Tina Fey), The Devil and Webster, The White Rose, The Sabbathday River and A Jury of Her Peers, as well as Interference Powder, a novel for children. Her company BOOKTHEWRITER hosts Pop-Up Book Groups in which small groups of readers discuss new books with their authors. She lives in New York City with her husband, Irish poet Paul Muldoon.