The author of the beloved novels Gospel and Emma Who Saved My Life, Wilton Barnhardt is a writer of rare and extraordinary talent who has yet to walk the same ground twice. With Show World he offers a contemporary woman's story that will haunt its every reader. Samantha Flint, the figure at the book's center, flees the Midwest for Smith College to shake her past, to invent a future she can live with. There she meets the redoubtable Mimi Mohr; together and apart they move from New York to DC to LA. Yet even as each new city takes them to fresh heights of power and wealth, everything Sam wants seems to elude her—and after a series of lapses, both desperate and careless, she finds her dreams have turned against her.A work of withering satire and unmatched imagination, Show World is Wilton Barnhardt's clear-eyed estimate of America and what we all want out of her.

From the New York Times-bestselling author of Lookaway, Lookaway, Wilton Barnhardt's Western Alliances is a vivid portrait of a wealthy family set against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis. This laugh-out-loud, darkly funny novel follows the Costa family—whose members are every bit as richly absurd as the characters in HBO's Succession.Salvador, the patriarch, runs one of Wall Street's biggest banks the summer before everything collapses; Roberto and Rachel, his two children, have never worked a day in their lives; and Lena, his ex-wife, is a scheming hypochondriac. Part travelogue, part epic family drama, the novel follows Roberto and Rachel across Europe as the two dilettantes come to terms with their father's choices and the repercussions of his actions.Oozing with his signature satire and biting wit, Barnhardt invites readers on a literary romp from an elegant Paris apartment to a hilariously-inept London hotel, ancient...

A big, funny, engaging, unsentimental and sometimes even wise book...Delightful."—New York PostAuthor of Lookaway, LookawayWilton Barnhardt's novel of coming of age in New York City brims with energy, surprise, irresistible humor, and the heady rush of youth. Its hero, Gil Freeman, a midwestern aspiring actor, comes to the city in search of stardom—but instead encounters the perils of Alphabet City, the desperation of off-off-off-Broadway theater...and the exhilarating, exasperating, absolutely unique Emma, around whom his life comes to turn. Charming and engaging, quintessentially American, Emma Who Saved My Life is one of the extraordinary fiction debuts of our time.

Author of Emma Who Saved My Life and Lookaway, Lookaway Gospel concerns the search for a lost first-century gospel of the Bible, a document that could shake the foundations of Christianity. Wilton Barnhardt's narrative races through three continents, nine countries, and dozens of colorful locales, as two characters—shy theological student Lucy Dantan and hard-drinking, disillusioned ex-Jesuit Patrick O'Hanrahan—pursue rumors and clues about the gospel's whereabouts and contents. In the end, what they discover will challenge and forever change the nature of faith.An intellectual detective story with the erudition of Umberto Eco and the grand swirling entertainment of a nineteenth-century novel, Gospel is exciting, profound, revent, and terrifically funny.