The Brightness

A Novel

By: Chad Harbach

From the bestselling author of literary sensation The Art of Fielding comes an urgent, deeply felt story of friendship, art, love, and grief, following two young women on the brink of irrevocable change.

Parties and weddings, messy hookups and marred friendships, art and love and grief—The Brightness follows the electric, chaotic, everything-can-happen lives of Pella and her best friend, Irma, as they fumble their way out of sleepy, Midwestern Westish College and into a larger world that will upend their connection and everything they thought they understood about their own place within it.

At 27, Pella’s life looks settled: she’s a recent college grad, engaged to Mike, her longtime boyfriend, and helping her friend Owen pull off his own destination wedding on Block Island. But over that wild wedding weekend, Pella’s past and present collide spectacularly, blowing up her plans and sending her spiraling toward an unplanned future in New York City. Meanwhile, back at Westish College, 21-year-old Irma’s involvement with a politically charged prank—one that has roiled both the campus and the world beyond—threatens to derail her brilliant future. As Irma and Pella cycle through possibilities and identities, both navigate the heights and depths of passion and ambition, and the incalculable wages of love and loss.

In stunning scenes and spectacular characters—each drawn with an almost superhuman vividness and humanity—Chad Harbach captures that specific, shimmering anxiety of your twenties when life still feels wide open, even as hard and irreversible choices start closing in. Energetic, funny, and deeply human, this much-anticipated follow-up to The Art of Fielding confirms Chad Harbach as one of the most accomplished and deep-seeing writers of our time.

Critic reviews

“A good book is propulsive, you can’t put it down, etc. A really good book fosters scarcity and you want to put it down as frequently as you can to live in the narrative longer. But a great book makes you feel a sort of frustration with the author that they wrote it before you. This is a good, really good, and great book. It captures a. what it was like to be a girl in college in 2016, which I was but imagine Chad wasn’t, which makes it all the more impressive, b. the complicated nature of female friendship, and c. the wonderful excruciating confusion of growing up. I could not put it down, except when I had to in order to savor it."—Madeline Cash, author of Lost Lambs