Belzhar

Hot off the buzz-worthy success of The Interestings, acclaimed novelist Meg Wolitzer makes her YA debut in a brilliantly plotted, wryly funny story of love and recovery.
Hot off the buzz-worthy success of The Interestings, acclaimed novelist Meg Wolitzer makes her YA debut in a brilliantly plotted, wryly funny story of love and recovery.

Jam Gallahue loved a boy – fiercely and deeply – and then she lost him. Before the 41 days that she knew him, she had no idea she could need someone so much, but after, she needed him all the time. Except she couldn’t have him, because he was dead: gone forever. Or so she thought.

At The Wooden Barn, a boarding school for “emotionally fragile and highly intelligent” teenagers, Jam starts out as she has been for the past year: inconsolable, uninterested, stuck. She doesn’t think much of Special Topics in English, the exclusive, supposedly transformative class she’s been selected to join, or its roster of merely five students. At least not until she has an inexplicable experience – one that only these five peers, each uniquely broken, can understand. Studying the life works of Sylvia Plath and chronicling their pain in journals, Jam and her Special Topics classmates have all visited Belzhar, a miraculous place – a place where the untainted past is restored, and where Jam can feel her first love’s arms around her once again. But there are hidden truths on Jam’s path to reclaim her loss …revelations expertly and deliciously crafted by the supremely talented, bestselling Wolitzer.

Meg Wolitzer is a New York Times bestselling, critically acclaimed novelist. She studied creative writing at Smith College and graduated from Brown University. Two of her many novels have been adapted for the screen: This Is My Life, scripted and directed by Nora Ephron, and the 2006 TV movie Surrender, Dorothy, starring Diane Keaton. Meg has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Skidmore College and she currently teaches writing at Columbia University. She lives in New York with her husband and sons.