When a young woman, a golf prodigy, accidentally 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 in this spellbinding novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Flight Attendant.
1978: It is the first Thursday in August and temperatures are flirting with ninety when Mira Winston, eighteen years old, drives a practice ball from her tee with a wooden club. The golf ball, weighing 1.6 ounces, tears through the net, travels 150 miles per hour for fifteen yards and slams, with sickening force, into the forehead of a high school junior named Kenny Foster, causing a traumatic rupture in the frontal lobe of his brain. Kenny brings his right hand to his forehead, then topples to his side. He is 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 forty years 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 Henry Fallows, the golf pro, looks more closely at the torn net, when the detective investigating the case 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 district courtroom, The Amateur What happens when one small moment—a swing, a ball, a piece of string—changes the course of an entire life?
Book Info: Print length: 318 pages. Publisher: Penguin. Publication Date: 20 Aug 2026
My Thoughts:
This is my first book by Chris Bohjalian and having seen The Amateur appear all over Instagram recently I knew I had to read it.
I didn’t really bother reading the blurb so I went in not quite knowing what to expect and what I didn’t expect was to be drawn in from the opening paragraph and gripped until the very end.
The Amateur is narrated by Mira Winston. At the age of 18, Mira was living a charmed life in an affluent suburb of New York. She was a golf prodigy with a bright future ahead of her and on her way to Yale when a freak accident at the golf course changes her life in ways no-one could have foreseen.
Without giving anything away, Mira is a fascinating character to read. I’m not sure if I liked her or even understood her, she was certainly damaged and came from a dysfunctional family. Her actions were questionable throughout, but there was no doubt what was a tragic event then caused lasting trauma throughout her life.
Whilst narrating her story/memoirs, she is brutally honest and open and some readers may find some of the topics difficult to read. There are themes of grooming/child abuse/suicide and drug use and whilst they are never glamourised, they are very raw and real emotions which give Mila that extra depth to her character and behaviour.
Overall, I thought it was an exceptionally brilliant novel exploring accountability, class and privilege and the overall impact of tragedy.
