In this dazzling debut novel about love and betrayal, a young couple moves to New York City in search of success-only to learn that the lives they dream of may come with dangerous strings attached.
Julia and Evan fall in love as undergraduates at Yale. For Evan, a scholarship student from a rural Canadian town, Yale is a whole new world, and Julia -- blond, beautiful, and rich -- fits perfectly into the future he's envisioned for himself. After graduation, and on the eve of the great financial meltdown of 2008, they move together to New York City, where Evan lands a job at a hedge fund. But Julia, whose privileged upbringing grants her an easy but wholly unsatisfying job with a nonprofit, feels increasingly shut out of Evan's secretive world.
With the market crashing and banks failing, Evan becomes involved in a high-stakes deal at work -- a deal that, despite the assurances of his Machiavellian boss, begins to seem more than slightly suspicious. Meanwhile, Julia reconnects with someone from her past who offers a glimpse of a different kind of live. As the economy craters, and as Evan and Julia spin into their separate orbits, they each find that they are capable of much more -- good and bad -- than they'd ever imagined.
Rich in suspense and insight, Anna Pitoniak's gripping debut reveals the fragile yet enduring nature of our connections: to one another and to ourselves. The Futures is a glittering story of a couple coming of age, and a searing portrait of what it's like to be young and full of hope in New York City, a place that so often seems determined to break us down -- but ultimately may be the very thing that saves us.
"The next great New York novel."-Town & Country
"A story that feels familiar yet wholly original, like every heartbreak ever."-Marie Claire
"Pitoniak's precise and incisive powers of observation give us a book with startling grace notes ... As in earlier, seminal novels about similar 20-something cohorts-among them Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar-the city is another mirror character, a puzzle the protagonists must solve as they come to grips with their own lives."-NPR.org Anna Pitoniak is the author of The Futures and Necessary People. She worked for many years in book publishing, most recently as a Senior Editor at Random House. She grew up in Whistler, British Columbia, and now lives in New York City. "An emotional page-turner."
-Cosmopolitan "Boy meets girl. They fall in love and everything's picture perfect. Until the financial crisis hits and boy gets involved in a shady deal at work. This read is The Big Short meets Serendipity."-theSkimm "The smart, fast-paced book calls to mind a period when bright young things moved to New York to work for Goldman Sachs and not Google ... Part of a larger conversation about coming of age that includes novels like Adelle Waldman's The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. and Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children."-Town & Country "An especially good [novel]...about the things you believe in when you're young, and what breaks your heart along the way."
-Refinery29, "One of the 2017 Books We're Most Excited About" "[A] debut novel written by and for the literary millennial ... Pitoniak maintains her keen eye for the universal insecurities facing her generation today, from romantic uncertainties and the relative benefits and downsides of hedge fund and nonprofit jobs to the emotional effort it requires to negotiate the predetermined facts of one's upbringing with the person one chooses to become."-Harper's Bazaar, "13 Books You Need to Read in January" "Wall Street meets Girls."
-Elle Canada "Acutely drawn ... We were transported back to our younger selves and that universal feeling of trying to make sense of an uncertain future ahead ... Already looking forward to what Anna Pitoniak will write next."-goop "Pitoniak's debut focuses on that time of life that
