A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “A twisty, immersive whodunit perfect for fans of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.” —People "Spellbinding." —The New York Times Book Review "[An] irresistible literary page-turner." —The Boston Globe Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by TIME, NPR, USA Today, Elle, Newsweek, Salon, Bustle, AARP, The Millions, Good Housekeeping, and more The riveting new novel — "part true-crime page-turner, part campus coming-of-age" (San Francisco Chronicle) — from the author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist The Great Believers A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie. But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn’t as much of an outsider at Granby as she’d thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case. In I Have Some Questions for You, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.

Everyone at NUBClub had a positive take on I Have Some Questions for You, and some of us loved it. Makkai's novel looks at what happens when an alumna of a boarding school returns to investigate the murder of her classmates years earlier. At the heart of the book is a question of whether Thalia was killed by Omar (who is in jail for the crime) or someone else at the school, but the main character Bodie concentrates most on Denny Bloch, the drama teacher that Bodie suspects had an affair with Thalia. The return to the school under the auspice of teaching a workshop for current students allows Bodie, who investigates true crime stories for a podcast, to dig back into the facts of her time there and the circumstances around the crime. What makes the book interesting in part is the way that Bodie unpacks the school in both knowing and ignorant ways. On one hand, Bodie is constantly observing how the media reporting on Thalia's murder got basic details wrong -- the fact that the kids never made out on the mattresses in the woods or that Omar didn't deal drugs other than pot because other students were the real dealers. This makes it clear that outside perspectives on stories are suspect, which is interesting in a story where people are trying to tease out what other people's relationships were like. Makkai pushes this point by having Bodie be wrong or completely in the dark about other things at the school, such as who was rich and what gossip was commonly known. Makkai uses this thematic backdrop to get us to question the power dynamics, manipulation, and trauma of different relationships. Could Thalia have a true relationship with an adult man? (We felt No.) Was Bodie's ex-husband guilty of using power to seduce and manipulate a 21 year old artist? (Maybe, probably not.) Was Bodie's constant ribbing by classmates about being overly sexually aggressive or provocative harassment (Almost certainly yes.) But these stories, coupled with a complicated break-up of Bodie's own affair with a married man, lead us to realize how complicated and multi-sided all of these relationships are. Do the young men at the school know what they are doing when they engage in innuendo? Is Bodie's 'actual' sexual assault the time someone grabbed her breast in a photo? What Makkai does excellently in the book is make us feel the pain and in some cases continued torture of these experience, but contrasts them with short anonymized accounts of the deeper horrors of Matt Lauer's or Weinstein's crimes, to make us both realize how pervasive this kind of harassment can be and how fuzzy some of it can be ethically (between bad behavior and abuse) while there are still clear crimes that take place. At the same time, Bodie engages in exactly the same power manipulations to get what she wants -- using students to push the investigation into Omar's false sentencing, tricking a YouTube investigator to doing her dirty work, and seducing a friend of a possible suspect (while faking drinking) to get information out of him. Makkai does a good job of presenting a disturbing world of insiders and outsiders and the powerful manipulating the weak that the reader can't really escape from in the book. Some of us thought that Makkai occasionally was too exact and convenient with the plotting -- the Jerome story felt basically designed to be moral quandary to pick at -- and we felt that there could have been some better twists at point. But Makkai clearly knows this boarding school world and does a good job making all the characters, even minor ones (thinking of Beth here) more complex, both more culpable and more sympathetic than you expect. Overall, it's a troubling book in all the good ways, a novel that looks hard at a complex question and leaves you with a challenged view of the world. Our opinions of the book generally went up as we discussed all the ways the book studied manipulation and levels of abuse and othering. I Have Some Questions for You is worth a look.