A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR DAILY TELEGRAPH * DAILY MIRROR * DAILY EXPRESS * WALL STREET JOURNAL * BOSTON GLOBE * LIBRARY JOURNAL * CRIMEREADSAN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERThe mesmerising new thriller, set in the hothouse world of a ballet school, from the bestselling and award-winning writer Megan Abbott.Dara and Marie were trained as ballet dancers by their glamorous mother, founder of the Durant School of Dance. After their parents died in a tragic accident nearly a dozen years ago, the sisters took over running the school together with Charlie, Dara's husband and once their mother's prized student. But when a suspicious accident occurs, just at the onset of the school's annual performance of
The Nutcracker - a season of competition, anxiety, and exhilaration - an interloper arrives and threatens their delicate balance.
About the Author
Megan Abbott is the Edgar-winning author of the novels
Die a Little, Bury Me Deep, The End of Everything, Dare Me, You Will Know Me and The Fever. Her most recent book is
Give Me Your Hand.
Her work has won or been nominated for the CWA Steel Dagger, the International Thriller Writers Award, the
Los Angeles Times Book Prize and five Edgar awards. Formerly a staff writer on HBO's David Simon show, The Deuce, she is now co-creator, executive producer and show-runner of Dare Me, based upon her novel, for the USA Network and, internationally, Netflix.
Her writing has appeared in the
New York Times, Salon, the
Guardian, Wall Street Journal, the
Los Angeles Times Magazine, and
The Believer. Her stories have appeared in multiple collections, including the Best American Mystery Stories of 2014 and 2016.
Born in the Detroit area, she graduated from the University of Michigan and received her Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University. She has taught at NYU, the State University of New York and the New School University. In 2013-14, she served as the John Grisham Writer in Residence at Ole Miss.
She is also the author of a nonfiction book,
The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir, and the editor of
A Hell of a Woman, an anthology of female crime fiction.
Industry Reviews
Megan Abbott is
one of the finest writers working in any genre, anywhere and
THE TURNOUT might well be her masterpiece. Nobody else writes so well about the darkness and damage lurking just beneath an elegant and serene surface. Brilliant and breath-taking, this is
a book that you will not be able to forget - Mark Billingham (2021)
Abbott creates a
dark and mesmerising world and, as always, is
so brilliant at portraying women and girls and their competition and complexities ... It makes
Black Swan look like a children's story - Harriet Tyce, bestselling author of Blood Orange
There's no one who captures the atmosphere of a tight-knit hothouse world, in all its feverish beauty and brutality, quite like Megan Abbott - Tana French (2021)
Megan Abbott is the perfect storyteller-compelling, confounding and unconventional - VAL MCDERMID
There is not a writer alive who is better at investigating the tension and threat of violence at the centre of women's lives than Megan Abbott-
because no one else is looking at the violence from
within women's lives, as opposed to outside threats on trains, planes, in windows, or on dark, shadowy streets. Megan goes into the heart of female spaces and finds the ugly in all that pretty, the dark in all that light, with breath-taking suspense.
The Turnout has notes of James M. Cain and Alfred Hitchcock, but it's better because it's
so fresh and unexpected, so wholly revelatory. I turned page after page, holding my breath in fear, and also excitement, about what might happen in this run-down ballet school, what blood red might be lurking behind all that pink.
This is Megan Abbott working at the absolute height of her talent - ATTICA LOCKE
All one needs to know about a Megan Abbott book is that it's a Megan Abbott book --
dreamy, sexy, a deep dive into a subculture that has been exhaustively researched.
The Turnout is all those things and more, taking you so far into the world of a small ballet school that you feel the characters' aches and pains in your joints, your feet and, most dangerous of all, your heart - LAURA LIPPMAN
