My Dark Vanessa

This is my FAVORITE book. It’s an extremely challenging topic and you’ll feel nauseous the whole time but you’ll also be constantly stunned by how beautiful the writing is. Vanessa is so complex and real, and her struggle with being the “unreliable narrator” of her own life is what makes this such a compelling book. I highly recommend it to anyone who can handle the subject matter. – Viktoria

2000: Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher.

2017: Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse, and Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager may be far different from what she has always believed?

Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood. My Dark Vanessa is an era-defining novel that brilliantly captures and reflects the shifting cultural mores transforming our relationships and society itself. (Adapted from publisher summary)