- Most Popular Audiobooks
- New Audiobooks
- Kids Audiobooks
- Teen Audiobooks
- See all audiobooks collections
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 4 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 4 weeks
“Eerie, shocking, provoking, and beautifully written.”—Gillian Flynn
“I found it mesmerizing front to back.”—Michael Connelly
“I can’t remember the last time I read something so (darkly, disconcertingly) addictive.”—Rebecca Makkai
“An extraordinary novel . . . unlike any other mystery I’ve read.”—Joseph Finder
“Tom Ripley, eat your heart out.”—NPR
“A classic psychological suspense.”—People
“A dark, daring plunge into literary suspense . . . Oates dissects the predator-prey dynamic with merciless precision.”—The Seattle Times
AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR)
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Seattle Times, Vulture, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, AV Club, AARP
Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.
A hypnotic, galloping tale of crime and complicity, revenge and restitution, victim vs. predator, Joyce Carol Oates’s Fox illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands. A character as magnetically diabolical as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Francis Fox enchants and manipulates nearly everyone around him, until at last he meets someone he can’t outfox. Written in Oates’s trademark intimate, sweeping style, and interweaving multiple points of view, Fox is a triumph of craftsmanship and artistry, a novel as profound as it is propulsive, as moving as it is full of mystery.
-
Creators
-
Publisher
-
Release date
June 17, 2025 -
Formats
-
Kindle Book
-
OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780593978108
-
EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780593978108
- File size: 2592 KB
-
-
Accessibility
The publisher provides the following statement about the accessibility of the EPUB file supplied to OverDrive. Experiences may vary across reading systems. After borrowing the book, you may download the EPUB files to read in another reading system.
Summary
This ebook features mark-up that supports accessibility and enables compatibility with assistive technology. It has been designed to allow display properties to be modified by the reader. The file includes a table of contents, a defined reading order, and ARIA roles to identify key sections and improve the reading experience. A page list and page break locations help readers coordinate with the print edition. Headings allow readers to navigate the ebook quickly by level. Images are well described in conformance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Colors meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA contrast standards. There are no hazards.
Ways Of Reading
Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and font size, spaces between paragraphs, sentences, words, and letters, as well as color of background and text).
All content can be read as read aloud speech or dynamic braille.
Has alternative text descriptions for images.
Conformance
The publication contains a conformance statement that it meets the EPUB Accessibility and WCAG 2 Level AA standard.
The publication was certified by Penguin Random House LLC.
This publication claims to meet EPUB Accessibility 1.1 WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
Navigation
Table of contents to all chapters of the text via links.
Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation.
Additional Information
Page breaks included
High contrast between text and background
Color is not the sole means of conveying information
-
Languages
- English
-
Reviews
-
April 1, 2025
Award-winning and bestselling Oates (Butcher) sets her newest in dark academia, offering a new take on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita via a feminist twist, centered on Francis Fox, a beguiling English teacher. Prepub Alert.
Copyright 2025 Library Journal
Copyright 2025 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
-
Starred review from May 1, 2025
Francis Fox is every parent's, school official's, and small-town cop's worst nightmare. He's a wily creature, having narrowly avoided prison after a former student whom he was sexually abusing died by suicide. But Fox has adopted a new name, a new identity, and landed a new position as a middle-school English teacher at a prestigious South Jersey private school. To her credit, Langhorne Academy's headmistress thought there was something off about Fox, but he was just so darned charming. The students worship him, especially Genevieve, Mary Ann, and Eunice, the ones he calls "kitten," whom he ushers into his office after hours and plies with drug-laced cookies. When Fox's car is found in a remote, marshy ravine, his body nearly unrecognizable, and the cause of death is inconclusive, the community reels. Was it an accident, suicide, or murder? The investigation rocks this insulated enclave to its core. Oates owns the realm of genre-fluid fiction that focuses on the physical and psychological vulnerabilities of young women. Her latest foray explores the disturbing and chilling milieu of pedophilia from the viewpoints of predator and prey, protector and victim, exposing how easily people can be misled and the devastating consequences of misplaced trust. Menacing, mesmerizing, and thoroughly provocative.COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
-
Starred review from June 1, 2025
Oates continues to explore the dark side in this moody, often shocking mystery. Francis Fox doesn't enter the narrative until five dozen pages in, and when he does we find him in a sickening act: Deep-kissing a 12-year-old girl, "of which Little Kitten will never speak to others." Little Kitten is but one of Fox's victims, and he's in a perfect position to recruit more: Having been caught in the act in another state, he has changed his name and moved to a small town in the woods of south New Jersey, Oates' fictional terroir, and has resumed his revolting avocation as a middle school teacher. But as the story opens, Fox is perhaps no more: The denizens of and visitors to Wieland Pond--a forbidding swamp, "a wilderness in which cell phones are useless"--have noticed an unusual stench in a place full of them, as well as a rolled-over car and body parts. Lacking the means to quickly identify the victim, whose face is missing from its detached head, the local gendarmerie takes its time, with world-weary detective Horace Zwender slowly piecing together enough evidence of Fox's crimes to think, "No one more deserving of beingdead." Meanwhile, suspicion of murder falls on members of the rough-and-ready Healy family, one of whose ancestors is rumored to have shot down theHindenburg, and one of whose present members is among Fox's targets. Oates' descriptions of Fox's acts are stomach-turningly graphic but not prurient, as if to emphasize how a dangerous predator can move freely in an unending field of prey. But in the end she delivers a tautly wound procedural, elegantly written (and with a Nabokovian in-joke that joinsLolita to her tale), with an expertly constructed surprise ending. It's not for the squeamish, but Oates once again masterfully limns the worse angels of our nature.COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
-