The Book of George

Purchase: Amazon / B&N / Bookshop.org

Winner of the 2025 Gabe Hudson Prize

Shortlisted for the 2025 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize

A New Yorker and Washington Post Best Book of 2024

“An extraordinary artistic achievement.”—Gabe Hudson Prize committee citation

“Delicious…attains a perfect balance among irritation, pathos and comedy…How far we’ve come from John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom continually failing up. With its ironically canonical title, The Book of George captures the curdled resentment of a generation of young men unwilling or unable to adjust to a long-overdue redistribution of power and opportunity…Kate Greathead knows a particular subset of these floundering young men very well, painfully well, hilariously well.”—Washington Post

“The protagonist of this comic novel is George, a millennial with vague writerly aspirations…The women in George’s life, who bear the brunt of his self-absorption, confront him with his egotism in occasional moments of clarity—but whether they can cure him, this wry story suggests, is less clear.”—The New Yorker

“Greathead conveys the challenges faced by an entire generation with wit and compassion. This absorbing portrait of millennial malaise will surely resonate with anyone who knows a George.”—The Guardian (UK)

“Hilarious…Greathead’s skewering of this ‘specific kind of male arrogance’ is deeply satisfying, but her finely layered portrait is not without pity—it’s strangely, unexpectedly humanizing.”—Oprah Daily

“Greathead…is a gifted storyteller who reels off dialogue filled with wit and humor so well it makes page-turning a pleasure…Page after page, her writing is full of humor built around prickly sarcasm and woebegone twists in George’s life. There are serious, even sad, moments, plus plot turns that give the narrative depth. The reader may begin to feel an emotional tug… real poignancy.”—Associated Press

“Clever and thoughtful…this original read is moving in ways you won’t see coming.”—Real Simple

“Greathead has quietly delivered a scathing indictment of millennials in a novel that risks becoming one of those that defines a generation.”—Chicago Review of Books

“Riveting and wry…This is a revelation.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“George is a captivatingly mediocre antihero…Greathead’s delicious deadpan delivery, with its understatement and ironic humor, is irresistible. The Book of George can take its place next to other novels with lovably frustrating main characters like Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove.”—BookPage

“Greathead’s portrayal of an aggrieved white man struggling to find his place in the world is as much a portrait of an unsuccessful artist as a young man as it is a portrait of our times. A mordantly wry examination of one disgruntled man’s life.”—Kirkus

“This book is a knockout. Mesmerizing from page one, it’s Stoner meets Mrs. Bridge meets George, the millennial male we can’t look away from. Kate Greathead has gifted us with a character for the ages and a novel that is sure to be swooned over and endlessly discussed.”—Maria Semple, New York Times bestselling author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette

“The Book of George is not only an excellent novel, it’s also one of the most interesting books I’ve read in a long time. Engaging from the first page, it nevertheless gains momentum as it progresses, deftly building toward something larger and unexpected, a portrait of a character—and to an extent a generation—that’s as convincing as it is moving.”—Adelle Waldman, bestselling author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. and Help Wanted

“Kate Greathead is an astonishingly talented writer. Every sentence in this novel glitters with insight and humor. A perceptive, funny and tender portrayal of the complicated relationships that define our adulthood.”—Alison Espach, author of Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance

UK edition

Purchase: Amazon UK

Laura & Emma

Belletrist Book Club Selection for April 2018

Named a Best Book of 2018 by The Guardian, Esquire, The New York Post

“Masterly deftness, funny sentence by funny sentence. By the end, what seems to have been a casually episodic narrative reveals itself to be a moving and intricately braided story of two mothers.”
—Jonathan Franzen, The Guardian‘s Best Books of 2018

“Greathead’s debut, which often has the feel of an updated version of Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell’s 1959 classic study of repressed WASP womanhood, is…enlivened by flashes of sardonic humor…[and a] surprising, poignant and beautifully composed final scene…This carefully observed family story rings true to life.”
—New York Times Book Review

“A beguiling, addictive read.”
—People, Book of the Week

“Each restrained and understated sentence has been polished to glittering brightness… despite this novel’s enormous restraint and despite the surface pleasures of its comedy, Laura and Emma is a profoundly sad book. It’s loneliness in the form of a novel, and beneath its fierce quietness, there’s an ache that never stops.”
—Vox

“Absorbing…Laura is a wonderfully complex and, at times, frustrating character: ashamed of the old-money world from which she came, but not so brave or ambitious as to abandon it altogether, and the novel, for all its humor and sharp observations, is imbued with the loneliness at her core.”
—Oprah.com

“Wryly observed.”
—Vogue

“A layered story about mothers and daughters and identity.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“Kate Greathead’s debut novel gamely takes on class conflict, single motherhood, and the discreet pretension of the 1980s Upper East Side.”
—New York

“A deft exploration of conflict, both class and interfamilial, in 1980s blue-blood New York.”
—Marie Claire

“Greathead has wrought a tale of subtle beauty more closely akin to the proud and obedient midwesterners of Evan S. Connell’s fiction…Greathead’s power as a prose stylist and storyteller converge to create scenes that will linger with you for days after reading them…The characters in this book live in a world few of us will relate to, but in Greathead’s hands, their humanity is deeply felt.”
—ESME

“The darkly funny way that single, thirtysomething Laura gets pregnant in 1981 sets the tone for Greathead’s polished debut…Most impressive are the ways Greathead restrainedly shows her characters stretching at the seams of their own by-now-inherited restraint, and she paints their immense privilege with knowing nuance. Greathead’s smart and original take on the mother-daughter novel impresses and charms.”
—Booklist

“This novel makes a seemingly unlikable character sympathetic and interesting to the point that her story becomes unputdownable. ”
—Library Journal

“This ultimately rather mysterious book, with its attenuated plot and restrained humor, is like a person who speaks so softly that you end up paying very close attention.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Warmhearted… Greathead is a talented writer of detail, particularly in her evocations of New York life…This is a thoughtful novel of trying to find oneself despite an assigned place in the world.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Few books can grapple with the weighty legacy of Mrs. Bridge and come out standing; this one does. Stylish and understated, with grace notes everywhere, ironic reversals at the ends of sections, and resonant lines of dialogue that quiver with multiple meanings. The tone is arch, contrapuntal, and the anthropology here is brilliant; Greathead is such a keen observer of this world of people laden by the customs of privilege, who struggle to express their feelings, or even have them in the first place, and she finds affect in unexpected corners. Objects return with talismanic power and we track their movements with great appreciation of the artistry involved. It’s devastating to watch these characters sabotage their own and others’ happiness, and Greathead sticks the landing with a remarkably moving ending.”
—Matthew Thomas, New York Times-bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves

“A big-hearted book, tenderly intelligent and mirthfully incisive in its exploration of family, class, and the difficulty of reconciling our own natures with the way we nurture others. In Greathead’s capable hands, Laura & Emma become luminously real, a lens through which the rarefied, often contradictory world of elite New York comes charmingly alive.”
—Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine and Intimations

“I stayed up all night to finish Laura & Emma. Weeks later, I’m still thinking about Laura, still bothered by her troubles, and marveling at how Kate Greathead made these characters and this world so real to me. A brave, unassuming, wonderful first novel.”
—Rebecca Schiff, author of The Bed Moved

Kate Greathead is the author of the novels The Book of George and Laura & Emma. A graduate of Wesleyan University and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair, and on NPR’s Moth Radio Hour. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the writer Teddy Wayne, and their children.

Photo credit: Pete Pin

Events:

Oct. 8, 2024: Books Are Magic (Montague Street)

Contact:

Catryn Silbersack, catryn.silbersack@hholt.com

Literary agent: Amy Williams, amy@williamsliterary.com

kgreathead AT gmail.com