The Amateur: A Novel
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Midwives and The Flight Attendant: When a young woman, a golf prodigy, kills a caddy with a stray ball at the country club, the investigation of this freak accident reveals a dark and shocking tale of secret affairs, predatory men, and a teenager on trial.
1978: It is the first Thursday in August and temperatures are flirting with ninety when Mira Winston, eighteen years old, drives a golf ball from her tee toward the practice net near the clubhouse and caddy shack. The golf ball, weighing 1.6 ounces, tears through the net, traveling 150 miles per hour, and slams, with sickening force, into the temple of a high school junior named Kenny Foster, rupturing an artery and unleashing a torrent of blood. Kenny brings his hand to the side of his head, then topples onto his side. He’s dead before the ambulance even arrives.
In the wake of this terrible accident—and everyone, at first, agrees it was an accident—Mira looks for comfort in all the wrong places: In her lover, Theo Catton, a married man three decades her senior. In her mother, a well-kept woman with secrets of her own. In the dead caddy’s little sisters, girls bewildered by grief. But when the investigators look more closely at the torn net, when a detective recalls Mira’s history of recklessness, and when Kenny’s father spies Mira with her married lover, the affluent and mannered community turns on this once-promising young woman. A gripping story that takes the reader from the sun-soaked greens of a tony Westchester country club to the fluorescent-lit stand of a county courtroom, The Amateur asks: What happens when one small moment—a swing, a ball, a piece of string—changes the course of an entire life?
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Community Reviews
The Amateur (audiobook)
by Chris Bohjalian
The Amateur is my first book by Bohjalian, but it most certainly won’t be my last. Shortly into the audible book, I realized the razor sharp collegiate tone of exceptional writing, and knew that I had mistaken a serious psychologically deep and morally complex novel for a light hearted mystery thriller, earning a well-deserved 5 stars from me.
However, a strong word of caution is required: this is not a book for someone with sensitivities. It confronts intensely difficult and distressing subject matter that can be profoundly unsettling. Unspooling this intricate narrative takes genuine patience and a willingness to understand that the book is about something much deeper than the actual story on the page—the true hallmark of exceptional literary fiction.
On the surface, the plot follows a tragic accident at a country club where a young woman’s errant golf ball results in a fatal catastrophe, unearthing a wave of illicit and predatory dynamics. Yet, beneath the courtroom suspense, Bohjalian uses the narrative to explore profound themes of guilt, exploitation, adolescent vulnerability, and the devastating ripple effects of a single, fateful moment.
It demands an engaged reader who is willing to look past the immediate thriller elements and grapple with uncomfortable, challenging truths about human behavior, so the tone and language of the novel is as ugly and revolting as the reality of the protagonist’s situation.
The ending is as redemptive as the narrative will allow, and it seems to me an exceptional talent to be able to write something like this.
https://cerebralspice.wordpress.com/2026/09/27/book-list-the-amateur-by-chris-bohjalian
Chris Bohjalian knocks it out of the park again. He is a genius writer. One warning about this book:
POSSIBLE TRIGGERS. The book includes details related to suicide and pedophilia. For many readers, those topics could understandably be disturbing or triggering. I don’t recommend this book if that includes you.
People are volatile, and no two react to a capricious God in quite the same way. It is chance that pulls the strings. A hole in a net, a tee shot that’s more line drive than moon shot, a name called into the air. A boy looking up. With one swing of a golf club, an eighteen year old girl creates a legal morass.
Mira Winston seems to ruin everything she touches. Bad choices and bad luck mark her as much as the colors of her eyes or her hair. A Venus flytrap for men with certain cravings and proclivities, she is a wild and irresponsible dissembler with a bad past who couldn’t be allowed to get away with what she had done. She is the ultimate amateur, and a photo the size of a stamp–even a first-class one–is as big as she’ll ever get.
Duty. Breach. Causation. Damages. Babies. Abortions. Wrecked families and rumors of young girls trying to take their own lives. Romances with older men. The death of classmate Kenny Foster. And now the trials–plural–a criminal trial and then a civil trial–one for manslaughter.
But at its heart, the story is about class: on the surface, Mira is demonized as a spoiled golfer whose callous indifference to the rules led directly to the death of a caddy with pluck and luck who was going places. She played golf. He caddied. Could there have been a more obvious chasm in a place like that? But even in a suburban small town like Tallmadge, it’s easy to lose your moral compass…
Chris Bohjalian is a literary surgeon who knows just how to find the pulse and soul of a novel and understands where stories fit in the cultural zeitgeist. If you like to read books that make you cry, leave you gutted, and offer a sucker punch in the best possible way, The Amateur is an Albatross!
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