Famous Men

From the acclaimed author of Marlena comes a vivid, uncompromising novel about a young woman looking for a father and finding herself.

"Julie Buntin understands the complexity of morality, declining easy answers to difficult questions about art and ethics as well as sex and desire. I tore through it."--Rumaan Alam, author of Entitlement and Leave the World Behind

"Haunting and knife-bright . . . Famous Men renders womanhood with unsettling clarity."--Kiley Reid, author of Come and Get It and Such a Fun Age

The right book at the right time can change your life.

Will Miles is trapped. Trapped in tiny Greening, Michigan, where a toxic high school rumor has turned her into a social exile. Trapped in the predictable routines of her mother, and under the unrelenting gaze of her mother's increasingly sinister boyfriend. But when Will stumbles across the early poems of Nathaniel Fellow, a famous writer forty years her senior who also grew up in Greening, she feels she's found a kindred spirit. A passing comment from her mother only adds to Will's fascination: Is Nathaniel the father she's never known?

Will orchestrates a plan to track Nathaniel down, following in his footsteps to New York City, where she learns he's not the answer to her past, not the way she imagined. But their meeting sparks a complicated, consuming relationship that gives Will sidelong access to a world she's only ever imagined: of writers and intellectuals, a financial safety net, and, most intoxicatingly, a glimpse into her own potential. But who is Nathaniel Fellow, off the page? And what will shaping her life to suit his cost her? When a torrent of information about his past threatens not just her life with Nathaniel, but the story she tells herself about him, Will is faced with a choice that will change everything.

A gripping novel about ambition, parents and children, and all the ways women still pay for men's mistakes, Famous Men traces one woman's journey to the truth of where she comes from, what she's capable of, and how she might start again.

Author: Julie Buntin
Publisher: Random House
Published: 07/14/2026
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.26lbs
Size: 9.52h x 6.33w x 1.36d
ISBN: 9780593229958


Review Citation(s):
Booklist 05/01/2026
Publishers Weekly 05/25/2026
Kirkus Reviews 06/01/2026

About the Author
Julie Buntin's debut novel, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, released in ten territories worldwide, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen outlets, including The Washington Post, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews. She is the co-editor of Notes to New Mothers, a collection of dispatches from postpartum life by sixty writers and artists. Previously, Buntin was an editor and director of writing programs at Catapult. Now, she writes and teaches in Ann Arbor, where she is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.