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Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: AudiobookHub Recommendation
Chapter 2: — A Flicker on the Tape
Chapter 3: — Back to the Scene of the Story
Chapter 4: — The Class That Reopens the Case
Chapter 5: — Suspicions, Teachers, and Old Ghosts
Chapter 6: — Omar’s Story, in His Own Light
Chapter 7: — Memory as Montage
Chapter 8: — Filling in the Night
Chapter 9: — Thalia, Before She Was a Case
Chapter 10: — The Hearing
Chapter 11: — The Golden Boy and the Bike
Chapter 12: — The Present Cracks Open
Chapter 13: — Mr. Bloch, in Second Person
Chapter 14: — Blood on the Wall
Chapter 15: — Into the Woods
Chapter 16: — Living With Unfinished Answers
Description
Bodie Kane has built a careful adult life—mother, film scholar, and cohost of a podcast about women in Hollywood—far from the New Hampshire boarding school where she once felt invisible. When she returns to Granby to teach a mini course, a student asks to make a podcast about the school’s most mythologized tragedy: the 1995 drowning of Bodie’s former roommate, the charismatic senior, Thalia Keith.
The supposed killer—Omar Evans, a young Black athletic trainer—confessed under extreme pressure and later recanted. The story felt settled. But Bodie’s students have questions, the internet has theories, and a grainy high school musical video won’t stop replaying in her mind. As new details surface, Bodie’s memories and loyalties begin to shift. What do we owe the truth when it upends other people’s lives—our own included?
Rebecca Makkai’s novel is a propulsive mystery and a searching meditation on power, complicity, and how the stories we tell about girls and women ossify into the histories we accept.
Who Should Listen
- Listeners who love morally tangled campus mysteries with heart
- True-crime fans interested in systemic questions, not just answers
- Book clubs eager for debates about memory, race, power, and responsibility