In summer 1978, Mira Winston seems to have it all: rich parents, acceptance to Yale University and the adoration of her Westchester County country club, where she’s known as a golf prodigy. Then she slams a ball into a faulty practice net and kills caddy Kenny Foster, her high school classmate. Mira interprets the freak accident as divine punishment for her affair with a much older married man. And bit by bit, her life unravels.
This is the premise of Weybridge author Chris Bohjalian’s 25th novel, The Amateur, out on Tuesday, August 4, which takes readers on a wild ride through the psyche of a smart, self-aware and dangerously damaged young woman. Telling the story from the vantage point of decades later, when she is a successful novelist, Mira insists that “I am a very reliable narrator,” not the type to “perform a little cause-and-effect sleight of hand in the last act or upend the narrative with obfuscation.”
But is she? As new facts about Kenny’s death emerge, along with details of her own secret life, the young Mira becomes a pariah. And the older Mira grapples with questions of agency and culpability, as changing times lead her to reconsider a relationship she once considered consensual.
Bohjalian told Seven Days that he wrote The Amateur over a whirlwind three months in which no one else knew about the manuscript except the Burlington attorney he consulted for legal details. “I was afraid if I told anyone else what I was writing, they’d think I’d lost my mind,” he said. But when he eventually sent the book to his editor, agents, wife and daughter with the subject line “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” they were enthralled.
The Amateur is a gripping story that feels personal and lived-in because it is. The two characters on whom the plot pivots — Kenny and Mira — reflect facets of their creator, as we discovered while asking Bohjalian three questions about the book.
Would you call The Amateur a thriller or suspense novel? How is it different from thrillers you’ve written, such as The Flight Attendant?
I wouldn’t call it a thriller. I would call it a page-turner. When I was writing it — in an alchemic frenzy in 90 days in the summer of 2024 — it never crossed my mind that I might be writing a novel of suspense. But I think in 2026, if I published [his 1997 novel] Midwives, even Midwives would be called a “novel of suspense,” because most of what sells is either novels of suspense — which, dear God, I love, love, love — or romantasy, thrillers, romance.
Why golf? Where did the idea originate?
When I began this book, I was interested fundamentally in exploring the class divide in America.
At one point in my life, I went to five schools in three states in six years. I was always the outsider. And suddenly we moved to Westchester, and my summer job was as a caddy. I made a lot of money by my standards. I was working outside, and I could read for an hour under the caddy pergola over lunch. I was tan; I was buff; I was — by my standards — cash rich. But I also always understood this weird dynamic that none of my classmates caddied. I was caddying for their parents.
So I had a sense of class-divide discomfort. I wouldn’t have phrased it that way then; I wouldn’t have known quite how to phrase it except for the fact that it often felt awkward. And that was where the book began.
Your protagonist is also a novelist, and fans will notice that her novels in the book sound much like yours! I’m wondering: Why that mirroring?
“Mirror” is the right word. [In the novel, Mira calls her childhood world of make-believe Mirror Land, which her parents interpret as “Mira Land.”] Mira lives in a world of guilt and self-loathing and magical thinking, and that is so my world. One of the ways this book morphed when I was writing was through my own self-examination of all of my own demons and all of my own regrets and all of the things for which I feel guilty, which I understand were not my fault but nonetheless live with.
The reality of Mira is that she’s been exploited and abused since she was 15 years old, and she’s a ferocious competitor. And when she lashes out, she’s viewed as dislikable, rather than as damaged or fragile. A lot of the stuff she does as a young woman, I got away with as a young man.
In The Amateur, I am both the dead high school student and the instrument of death. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Fore-Boding | Three questions for Chris Bohjalian on his new novel, The Amateur“
This article appears in July 29 • 2026.
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