For fans of Conversations with Friends and Vladimir comes a magnetic, fresh take on marriage and loyalty: when two married professors tiptoe toward infidelity, their transgressions are brought to light in a graduate student’s searing thesis project. .
SEDUCTION THEORY
by Emily Adrian
Little, Brown, August 2025
(via Writers House)
Simone is the star of Edwards University’s creative writing department: renowned Woolf scholar, grief memoirist, and campus sex icon. Her less glamorous and ostensibly devoted husband, Ethan, is a forgotten novelist and lecturer in the same department. But when Ethan and the department administrative assistant Abigail have sex, Simone and Ethan’s faith in their flawless marriage is rattled.
Simone has secrets of her own. While Ethan’s away for the summer, she becomes inordinately close with her advisee, graduate student Roberta “Robbie” Green. In Robbie, Simone finds a new running partner, confidante, and disciple—or so she believes. Behind Simone’s back, Robbie fictionalizes her mentor’s marriage in a breathtakingly invasive MFA thesis. Determined to tell her version of the story, Robbie paints a revealing portrait of Simone, Ethan, Abigail, and even herself, scratching at the very surface of what may—or may not—be the truth.
Innovative, witty, and tender, Seduction Theory exposes the intoxicating nature of power and attraction, masterfully demonstrating how love and betrayal can coexist.
Emily Adrian is the author of Everything Here is Under Control and The Second Season, as well as the memoir Daughterhood and two critically acclaimed novels for young adults. Her work has appeared in Granta, Joyland, The Point, EPOCH, Alta Journal, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Originally from Portland, Oregon, Adrian currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
It’s 1999, and best friends Sal and Charo are striving to hold on to their dreams in a New York determined to grind them down. Sal is a book-loving science nerd trying to grow beyond his dead-end job in a new city, but he’s held back by tragic memories from his past in Santo Domingo. Free-spirited Charo is surprised to find herself a mother at twenty-five, partnered with a controlling man, working at the same supermarket for years, her world shrunk to the very domesticity she thought she’d escaped in her old country. When Sal finds love at a gay club one night, both his and Charo’s worlds unexpectedly open up to a vibrant social circle that pushes them to reckon with what they owe to their own selves, pasts, futures, and, always, each other.
The Sawbrooks have lived on prime real estate on the lakes of Michigan since before there was prime real estate. A family of smugglers and bootleggers, every man, woman, and child in each generation has been taught to navigate the nooks and crannies of the rivers and highways that flow in and out of Canada. The hidden routes are the family’s legacy.
Eve, the daughter of a renowned, tempestuous writer, is isolated in early motherhood when she runs into an enigmatic childhood friend she calls Demeter. Demeter’s daughter is unable to tolerate sunlight, and no doctors believe that the girl’s illness, which comes to be known as Emily Syndrome, is real. But Eve believes, and even suspects that it is the fact that Demeter is a struggling, under-educated single mother that the medical system shrugs off her daughter’s unusual symptoms. Their captivating, reborn relationship revives Eve, then pulls her into a crisis that engulfs her town and even threatens her own family. Determined to help everyone she loves, Eve learns that when disaster hits, we might not all be heroes, but our own flawed selves can be everything we need.