The Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s “strange and finally beautiful tale about obsession and modern love” (Beth Kephart, The Baltimore Sun).
Fair Warning is acclaimed novelist Robert Olen Butler’s enthralling glimpse into a Manhattan auction house that caters to the shopping pheromones of the rich and powerful.
At age forty, the company’s charismatic star employee, Amy Dickerson, is capable of selling a Renoir painting of a pudgy nude for twice its value. Her customers are intoxicated by the objects they covet. And sometimes, such as when the dark and mysterious Trevor locks eyes with Amy as she closes an auction with “fair warning,” that object is Amy herself. Selected as a Book Sense 76 title and as a New York Times Summer Reading title, Fair Warning “is as frank and sassy as its heroine” (Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe).
“Fair Warning deserves our praise, but its author also deserves our gratitude, for his continued risk-taking and stubbornly singular sensibility.” —Todd Kliman, The Washington Post
Robert Olen Butler is the author of ten novels and two collections of stories. In addition to a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and a National Magazine Award in 2001, he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and an NEA grant, as well as the Richard and Hinda Rosenfeld Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.