You Should Have Known - by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Paperback)

About the Book

In her latest book, author Grace Reinhart Sachs calls upon women to pay attention to their first impressions of men. But weeks before her book is published, a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and a chain of terrible revelations about the man she thought she knew.

Book Synopsis

In this "smart and devious" New York Times bestselling thriller, a marriage counselor's relationship begins to unravel when the mother of her son's classmate is murdered (The New York Times). The inspiration for the HBO series The Undoing, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant.

Grace Reinhart Sachs is living her best life. Devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice, her days are full of familiar things. Grace is also the author of a book You Should Have Known, in which she cautions women to really hear what men are trying to tell them.

But weeks before the book is published a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only an ongoing chain of terrible revelations, leading her to dismantle her life in order to create a new one, lest she allow these disasters to destroy her.

Review Quotes

"An unputdownably deft vivisection of Manhattan's upper social strata."--Vogue.com

"Korelitz does not disappoint as she chronicles the emotional unraveling of her heroine in this gripping saga...A cut above your average who-is-this-stranger-in-my-marriage-bed novel, "You Should Have Known'' transforms itself at certain moments from a highly effective thriller into a nuanced novel of family, heritage, identity, and nurture."--The Boston Globe

"Ms. Korelitz's book is smart and devious - enough so to bring to mind another work of trickery, one that has "Gone" in its title and does not feature Scarlett O'Hara."--The New York Times

"Tempt the gods with smug self-righteousness and they will deliver a windfall of tragedy, as witness in Jean Hanff Korelitz's rollickingly good literary thriller...Korelitz writes intimately and engagingly about a social strata few are privy to, but the ugliness is very familiar."--Vanity Fair

"The thriller we're obsessed with."--Entertainment Weekly

"This consuming, expertly plotted thriller moves along at a slow burn, building up to shocking revelations about Grace's past and ending with a satisfying twist on her former relationship mantra; 'doubt can be a gift.'"--People

"This excellent literary mystery [unfolds] with authentic detail in a rarified contemporary Manhattan. . . intriguing and beautiful."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

About the Author

Jean Hanff Korelitz was born and raised in New York and graduated from Dartmouth College and Clare College, Cambridge. She is the author of one book of poems, The Properties of Breath, and three previous novels, A Jury of Her Peers, The Sabbathday River, The Devil and Webster, and The White Rose, as well as a novel for children, Interference Powder. She has also published essays in the anthologies Modern Love and Because I Said So, and in the magazines Vogue, Real Simple, More, Newsweek, Organic Style, Travel and Leisure (Family), and others. She lives in Princeton, NJ with her husband (Irish poet Paul Muldoon, poetry editor at the New Yorker and Princeton poetry professor) and two children.