Famous Men

From the acclaimed author of the “wild, gorgeous” (San Francisco Chronicle) Marlena comes a novel about a young woman looking for a father and finding herself—a vivid, uncompromising exploration of sex, money, power, and art.

The right book at the right time can change your life.

Will Miles is trapped. Trapped in tiny Greening, Michigan, where a toxic high school rumor has turned her into a social exile. Trapped in the predictable routines of her mother, and under the unrelenting gaze of her mother’s increasingly sinister boyfriend. But when Will stumbles across the early poems of Nathaniel Fellow, a famous writer forty years her senior who also grew up in Greening, she feels she’s found a kindred spirit. A passing comment from her mother only adds to Will’s fascination: Is Nathaniel the father she’s never known?

Will orchestrates a plan to track Nathaniel down, following in his footsteps to New York City, where she learns he’s not the answer to her past, not the way she imagined. But their meeting sparks a complicated, consuming relationship that gives Will sidelong access to a world she’s only ever imagined: of writers and intellectuals, a financial safety net, and, most intoxicatingly, a glimpse into her own potential. But who is Nathaniel Fellow, off the page? And what will shaping her life to suit his cost her? When a torrent of information about his past threatens not just her life with Nathaniel, but the story she tells herself about him, Will is faced with a choice that will change everything. 

A gripping novel about ambition, parents, and children, and all the ways women still pay for men’s mistakes, Famous Men traces one woman’s journey to the truth of where she comes from, what she’s capable of, and how she might start again.