‘Chilling’ FINANCIAL TIMES

‘Utterly mesmeric’ GUARDIAN

‘Impressive and unsettling’ NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

‘Eerie, shocking, provoking’ GILLIAN FLYNN

‘Rich in suspense, diabolical secrets and psychological insight’ ECONOMIST

A spellbinding novel of literary and psychological suspense about the dark secrets that surface after the shocking disappearance of a charismatic, mercurial teacher at an elite boarding school.

Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.

A hypnotic, galloping tale of crime and complicity, revenge and restitution, victim vs. predator, Joyce Carol Oates’s Fox illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands. A character as magnetically diabolical as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Francis Fox enchants and manipulates nearly everyone around him, until at last he meets someone he can’t outfox. Written in Oates’s trademark intimate, sweeping style, and interweaving multiple points of view, Fox is a triumph of craftsmanship and artistry, a novel as profound as it is propulsive, as moving as it is full of mystery.

'Hauntingly explores the way that beguiling figures can inspire, create and shape art’ LOS ANGELES TIMES

'Mesmerizing' MICHAEL CONNELLY

'Oates is a genius' REBECCA MAKKAI

'Oates views the US through a gothic prism, forming images as striking as they are disturbing' FINANCIAL TIMES

'Absolutely chilling … this is Oates at her most disturbing and masterful’ SEATTLE TIMES

'Inescapably abhorrent yet enthralling … Oates understands, as always, how to keep us on the hook’ LOS ANGELES TIMES

'Engrossing even as it horrifies and reminds us that we cannot nor should not look away’ BIG ISSUE

‘A tautly wound procedural, elegantly written … Oates once again masterfully limns the worse angels of our nature’ KIRKUS REVIEWS

‘Menacing, mesmerizing, and thoroughly provocative’ BOOKLIST

Joyce Carol Oates latest thriller, set in a small, rural town, is a gripping exploration of the dark side of education. This up-coming novel is a must pre-order for fans of top-tier fiction stories.

For fans of Stephen King (Holly), Bret Easton Ellis (The Shards), Cormac Mccarthy (No Country for Old Men), and Kate Atkinson (Big Sky).

HarperCollins 2025