
Mabel must choose: either expose the ugliness surrounding her and face expulsion from paradise, or keep the family's dark secrets and make Ev's world her own. But as Mabel becomes an insider, a terrible discovery leads to shocking violence and reveals what the Winslows may have done to keep their power intact - and what they might do to anyone who threatens them. Before she knows it, she has everything she's ever wanted: friendship, a boyfriend, access to wealth, and, most of all, for the first time in her life, the sense that she belongs. Mabel falls in love with midnight skinny-dipping, the wet dog smell that lingers near the yachts, and the moneyed laughter that carries across the still lake while fireworks burst overhead. Ev invites Mabel to spend the summer at Bittersweet, her cottage on the Vermont estate where her family has been holding court for more than a century. A recipient of the Crazyhorse Prize in Fiction, she lives and writes in Brooklyn. On scholarship at a prestigious East Coast college, ordinary Mabel Dagmar is surprised to befriend her roommate, the beautiful, wild, blue-blooded Genevra Winslow. Miranda Beverly-Whittemore is the author of three other novels: New York Times bestseller Bittersweet Set Me Free, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, given annually for the best book of fiction by an American woman and The Effects of Light. On scholarship at a prestigious East Coast college, ordinary Mabel Dagmar is surprised to befriend her roommate, the beautiful, wild, blue-blooded Genevra Winslow.


Suspenseful and cinematic, New York Times best-seller Bittersweet exposes the Gothic underbelly of an idyllic world of privilege and an outsider's hunger to belong. Suspenseful and cinematic, Bittersweet exposes the gothic underbelly of an idyllic world of privilege and an outsider’s hunger to belong.
