This listing is for an Advance Reader's Edition (ARC) of "My Dark Vanessa" by Kate Elizabeth Russell. Hailed as "A well-constructed package of dynamite" by Stephen King and "One of the Hottest Books of 2020" by The New York Post, this is an international sensation and explosive debut. This edition is marked "NOT FOR SALE" and is an early printing for review purposes.

"He compared my hair to the color of maple leaves, slipped poetry into my hands. . . . He made me see myself as he did, a girl with the power to rise with red hair and eat him like air."

2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher. 2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in the relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how does Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved was a monster—and who professed to worship only her—may be far different from what she has always believed?

Written with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her body can wield, Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that shows vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood. Written with the chilling intimacy of The Girls and the creeping intensity of Room, My Dark Vanessa is an era-defining novel that brilliantly captures and reflects the shifting cultural mores transforming our relationships and society itself.