At long last, the NYT bestselling author of The Art of Fielding returns with an immersive, generation-defining epic: 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 Affenlight and her best friend, Irma, as they fumble their way into a larger world that won’t stop changing.

THE BRIGHTNESS
by Chad Harbach
Little, Brown, October 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

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.

It’s been fifteen years since The Art of Fielding published, but it continues to come up in conversation with many people referencing it as one of their favorite novels of all time. In The Brightness, Chad Harbach gives those who loved that book the opportunity to return to its indelible characters, but to see them in an entirely new light, while inviting a whole new generation of readers into his Westish world.

Chad Harbach is the author of the bestselling The Art of Fielding and a co-founder of n+1. He grew up in Wisconsin and attended Harvard and the University of Virginia. He lives in California.