The Amateur

When a young woman, a golf prodigy, accidentally kills a caddy with a stray ball at the country club, the investigation of this freak accident reveals a dark and shocking tale of secret affairs, predatory men, and a teenager on trial in this spellbinding novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Flight Attendant.

1978: It is the first Thursday in August and temperatures are flirting with ninety when Mira Winston, eighteen years old, drives a practice ball from her tee with a wooden club. The golf ball, weighing 1.6 ounces, tears through the net, travels 150 miles per hour for fifteen yards and slams, with sickening force, into the forehead of a high school junior named Kenny Foster, causing a traumatic rupture in the frontal lobe of his brain. Kenny brings his right hand to his forehead, then topples to his side. He is dead before the ambulance even arrives.

In the wake of this terrible accident--and everyone, at first, agrees it was an accident--Mira looks for comfort in all the wrong places: In her lover, Theo Catton, a married man forty years her senior. In her mother, a well-kept woman with secrets of her own. In the dead caddy's little sisters, girls bewildered by grief. But when Henry Fallows, the golf pro, looks more closely at the torn net, when the detective investigating the case recalls Mira's history of recklessness, and when Kenny's father spies Mira with her married lover, the affluent and mannered community turns on this once promising young woman. A gripping story that takes the reader from the sun-soaked greens of a tony Westchester country club to the fluorescent-lit stand of a district courtroom, The Amateur asks: What happens when one small moment--a swing, a ball, a piece of string--changes the course of an entire life?

Author: Chris Bohjalian
Publisher: Random House Large Print Publishing
Published: 08/04/2026
Pages: 432
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.97lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.00w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9798217347049

About the Author
Chris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-five books, including The Princess of Las Vegas, The Lioness, Hour of the Witch, Midwives, and The Flight Attendant, which was a Max series starring Kaley Cuoco. His other books include The Guest Room; Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands; The Sandcastle Girls; Skeletons at the Feast; and The Double Bind. His novels Secrets of Eden, Midwives, and Past the Bleachers were made into movies, and his work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. His novels have been selections of Oprah's Book Club and the Barnes & Noble Book Club. He is also a playwright (The Club, Midwives, and Wingspan). He lives in Vermont with his wife, photographer Victoria Blewer, and can be found at chrisbohjalian.com or on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), Litsy, and Goodreads, @chrisbohjalian.