**An American foreign-exchange student arrested for murder. A desperate father determined to win her freedom. The brilliant lawyer tasked with her prosecution. And the sphinx-like young man who happens to be her only alibi.**
When Lily Hayes arrives in Buenos Aires for her semester abroad, she is enchanted by everything she encounters: the colourful buildings, the street food, the elusive guy next door. Her studious roommate, Katy, is a bit of a bore, but Lily hasn’t come to Argentina to hang out with other Americans.
Five weeks later, Katy is found brutally murdered in their shared home, and Lily is the prime suspect. But who is Lily Hayes? It depends on who’s asking. As the case takes shape — revealing deceptions, secrets, and suspicious DNA — Lily appears alternately sinister and guileless through the eyes of those around her.
With mordant wit and keen emotional insight, Jennifer duBois delivers a novel of propulsive psychological suspense and rare moral nuance. *Cartwheel* will keep you guessing until the final page, and its questions about how well we really know one another — and ourselves — will linger well beyond.
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Jennifer duBois was born in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1983. She earned a B.A. in political science and philosophy from Tufts University and an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. After completing a Stegner Fellowship in fiction, Jennifer served as the Nancy Packer Lecturer in Continuing Studies at Stanford University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Playboy, The Wall Street Journal, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, The Florida Review, Narrative, ZYZZYVA, and FiveChapters, and has been anthologized in Imaginary Oklahoma, Esquire/Byliner’s “New Voices” collection, and Narrative 4’s “How To Be A Man” project. Her short story “Wolf” was named a Notable Story in Best American Short Stories 2012, and the first chapter of A Partial History of Lost Causes was selected as a Top Five Story of 2011-2012 by Narrative. Honored by the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 program, A Partial History of Lost Causes was the winner of the Northern California Book Award for Fiction and the California Book Award for First Fiction, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Prize for Debut Fiction. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University-San Marcos.
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Advance praise for Cartwheel
A USA Today Pick for Biggest Books of the Fall • A Pick for The Millions’ Most Anticipated Books of 2013
“In Cartwheel, Jennifer duBois begins with a familiar tabloid story and transforms it into something entirely new, vivid, and unforgettable. Her vision of a blundering criminal justice system and the ordinary, flawed people caught inside it rings true. And her voice—intelligent, humane, unsentimental—brings an entire world to life. Highly recommended.”—William Landay, New York Times bestselling author of Defending Jacob
“An astonishing, breathtaking, and harrowing read.”—New York Journal of Books
“[DuBois] does an excellent job of creating and maintaining a pervasive feeling of foreboding and suspense. . . . An acute psychological study of character that rises to the level of the philosophical . . . Cartwheel is very much its own individual work of the author’s creative imagination.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Jennifer duBois, a writer whose fierce intelligence is matched only by her deep humanity, hits us with a marvelous second novel that intertwines a gripping tale of murder abroad with an intimate story of family heartbreak. Every sentence crackles with wit and vision. Every page casts a spell.”—Maggie Shipstead, New York Times bestselling author of Seating Arrangements
“Cartwheel is so gripping, so fantastically evocative, that I could not, would not, put it down. Jennifer duBois is a writer of thrilling psychological precision. She dares to pause a moment, digging into the mess of crime and accusation, culture and personality, the known and unknown, and coming up with a sensational novel of profound depth.”—Justin Torres, New York Times bestselling author of We the Animals
“Jennifer duBois’s Cartwheel seized my attention and held it in a white-knuckled grip until I found myself reluctantly and compulsively turning its final pages very late at night. It’s an addictive book that made me miss train stops and wouldn’t let me go to sleep until I’d read just one more chapter. And it’s so much more than just a ravenous page-turner—it’s a rumination on the bloodthirsty rubbernecking of the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the bewitching powers of social media, and a scalpel-sharp dissection of innocence abroad, a book charged with a refreshing anger, but always empathic. Jennifer duBois has captured the sleazy leer of lurid crime and somehow twisted it into a work of art.”—Benjamin Hale, author of The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore
“Like its namesake, Cartwheel will upend you; rarely does a novel this engaging ring so true. Inscribed with the emotional intimacy of memory, this is one story you will not soon forget.”—T. Geronimo Johnson, author of Hold It ’Til It Hurts
Praise for Jennifer duBois’s A Partial History of Lost Causes
Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction
“Astonishingly beautiful and brainy . . . [a] stunning novel.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“A thrilling debut . . . duBois writes with haunting richness and fierce intelligence. . . . Full of bravado, insight, and clarity.”—Elle
“DuBois is precise and unsentimental. . . . She moves with a magician’s control between points of view, continents, histories, and sympathies.”—The New Yorker
“I can’t remember reading another novel—at least not recently—that’s both incredibly intelligent and also emotionally engaging.”—Nancy Pearl, NPR
“A real page-turner . . . a psychological thriller of great nuance and complexity.”—The Dallas Morning News
“Hilarious and heartbreaking and a triumph of the imagination.”—Gary Shteyngart
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