Good Company

From the brilliant Kate Christensen, winner of the PEN/Faulkner award forThe Great Man,comes a compelling, searing, funnynovel about women, sex, power, and self-reckoning. Ever since her father broke her heart when she was nine, Julia Heimdahl has tried to be good company for bad men: a jovial drinking companion, an easygoing, witty non-complainer, one of the boys. Now a literary novelist in late middle age and late mid-career, she is at a moment of crisis, although she doesnt know it yet.The noveltakes place over the course of a weekend-long book festival at Baldwin College, which happens to be Julias alma mater, where she has come to promote her recently published memoir. Shes been placed on a panel with a fellow memoirist named Ellis Blackwell, a man so outrageously flirtatious and fawningly flattering, Julia is almost too disarmed to recognize how dangerous he is.Interweaving excerpts from Julia's memoir with her encounters with important people from her pastthe woman she was in love with in college, her old New York mentor, her male editor, her literary nemesis, a former graduate studentGood Companyexamines what itreallymeans to be good company"e; as Julia faces her demons and comes to terms with what she really wants from sex, life, and work.