Can't Look Away

January 1, 2022

Jake Danner made a name for his band with the song he wrote about his passionate affair with barista Molly Diamond, but ten years later Molly is living sensibly in the suburbs with her husband and daughter. A friendship with newcomer Sabrina highlights how at odds Molly has been feeling, but Sabrina has her own devious reasons for suddenly appearing in town. And Jack's song is back on the radio. From the author of Too Good To Be True; with a 75,000-copy first printing.

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April 4, 2022
The wounds of the past fracture the present in this gripping psychological thriller from Lovering (Too Good to Be True). In 2013, a country group performs at a bar near aspiring writer Molly Diamond’s Brooklyn apartment. Her eyes meet those of the band’s charismatic singer, Jake Danner, and the two quickly fall in love. Though Jake ends his half-hearted relationship with his girlfriend, Sisi, so that he and Molly can live together, his unreliability and Molly’s suspicion that he’s cheating destroy her trust. By 2022, her writing dreams abandoned, Molly is married to a more reliable man. Lonely in their upscale Connecticut town and unable to forget Jake entirely, she’s delighted to meet Sabrina, a wealthy marketer who shares her ironic, offbeat sensibility. The two grow close, but Molly is unaware that Sabrina, who has nursed a secret grudge against her for years, hopes to sabotage what she sees as Molly’s perfect life. Lovering’s nuanced characterizations and interweaving of different voices and timelines add depth to her story of obsession. Fans of Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins will enjoy this one. Agent: Allison Hunter, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

Starred review from April 1, 2022
In a fancy Connecticut suburb, a woman is forced to come to terms with the choices she made nearly a decade earlier. Molly has a seemingly idyllic life in tony Flynn Cove, Connecticut, where she teaches yoga and resides with her reliable, catalog-handsome husband, Hunter, and adorable daughter, Stella. The only visible cracks in this picture-perfect world? A dearth of good friends, a rash of unpleasant fellow mothers, and fertility issues. Oh, and within the opening pages of the book, there are suggestive hints of the one who got away: That would be Jake Danner, a musician boyfriend from Molly's years in New York City, a time when she was working on her MFA in creative writing and rich in close friends. When the beautiful, entertaining, and intriguing Sabrina turns up at both Molly's Flynn Cove yoga class and her fertility clinic, she immediately ameliorates the lack-of-friendship aspect of Molly's life, bringing a welcome relief from the stuffier elements of the community. But as Lovering introduces narrative threads beyond Molly's, the mystery element of the story rises sharply. Weaving together several distinct timelines--Molly and Jake's meeting and falling in love in 2013, the paradigm shifts in their evolving relationship, and Molly's life in high-flying Flynn Cove--Lovering unspools a taut, twisty, humdinger of a plot that encompasses the vagaries of true friendship as well as those of true love. A slow-burning literary tease that plumbs the heights and depths of young love, creative ambitions, friendship, and betrayal.

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