NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE FALL BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

The follow-up to n+1 founding editor Chad Harbach’s beloved and bestselling debut novel The Art of Fielding—coming this October

At long last, the New York Times–bestselling author of The Art of Fielding returns with an immersive, generation-defining epic: Parties and weddings, messy hookups and marred friendships, art and love and grief—The Brightness follows the electric, chaotic, everything-can-happen lives of Pella Affenlight and her best friend, Irma, as they fumble their way into a larger world that won’t stop changing.

At 27, Pella’s life looks settled: she’s a recent college grad, engaged to Mike, her longtime boyfriend, and helping her friend Owen pull off his own destination wedding on Block Island. But over that wild wedding weekend, Pella’s past and present collide spectacularly, blowing up her plans and sending her spiraling toward an unplanned future in New York City.

There, in a city that’s equal parts glittering opportunity and cutthroat grit, Pella is forced to see herself in constantly changing lights as she wrestles with who she is and what she will become. As she cycles through possibilities and identities—is she an artist? A bartender? A scholar, a lover, a wife?—Pella navigates the heights and depths of passion and ambition, and the incalculable wages of love and loss.

In stunning scenes and spectacular characters—each drawn with an almost superhuman vividness and humanity—Chad Harbach captures that specific, shimmering anxiety of your twenties when life still feels wide open, even as hard and irreversible choices start closing in. Energetic, funny, and deeply human, this much-anticipated follow-up to The Art of Fielding confirms Chad Harbach as one of the most accomplished and deep-seeing writers of our time.

Praise for The Brightness

“Fifteen years after popping one into the bleachers with his best-selling debut, The Art of Fielding, Harbach returns with a sophomore effort that finds two Midwestern best friends reckoning with the messy realities of young adulthood.” —The New York Times

“In this funny, profound campus novel, Westish College is roiled by a prank that casts a spotlight on the school. Meanwhile, bright but chaotic grad Pella’s life gets upended at a splashy wedding.”—People

“As in his acclaimed debut, Harbach immerses readers in the world of Westish, but he broadens his scope, plunging his characters into new environments and broaching topics such as love and talent and literature, as well as campus sexual assault, feminism, the fraught politics of victimhood, and the volatile media landscape that complicates all of these. . . . Brilliant, poignant, and absorbing.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“A good book is propulsive, you can’t put it down, etc. A really good book fosters scarcity and you want to put it down as frequently as you can to live in the narrative longer. But a great book makes you feel a sort of frustration with the author that they wrote it before you. This is a good, really good, and great book. It captures a) what it was like to be a girl in college in 2016, which I was but imagine Chad wasn’t, which makes it all the more impressive, b) the complicated nature of female friendship, and c) the wonderful excruciating confusion of growing up. I could not put it down, except when I had to in order to savor it.” —Madeline Cash, author of Lost Lambs

“The Brightness is a monumental campus novel, full of smart and mercurial characters who feel as real as your own roommates. Chad Harbach’s absorbing, beautifully written follow-up to The Art of Fielding combines the ambitious scope and narrative vitality of a nineteenth century novel with a sharp and compassionate eye for the way we live now.” —Tom Perrotta, author of Ghost Town

“A deeply absorbing, vivid, and humane novel about the world as it is, the world as it could be, and the roles that provocation and imagination might play in closing the gap.”  —Lisa Halliday, author of Asymmetry

“The Brightness perfectly captures what it’s like to be in your twenties and facing down life’s enormous question: Who am I going to be? It’s also a good reminder to the rest of us that the answer to that question is never a settled thing. A brilliant and enchanting story about friendship, love, ambition, and growing up. I’ve been waiting for Chad Harbach’s second novel ever since I devoured his first one. This was worth the wait.” —Nathan Hill, author of Wellness

“The Brightness is such a wonder of a novel. I wanted to live in it, in part because Chad Harbach has built something that feels less like a sequel than a universe. He has that rare, tremendous gift of assuring you you’re in the hands of an absolute master. I was besotted from the first page and for every one of the nearly seven hundred that followed.” —Laurie Frankel, author of Enormous Wings

Praise for The Art of Fielding

“Harbach writes with a tender, egoless virtuosity . . . not since Lonesome Dove have I been so sorry to let a group of characters go.” ―Andres Corsello, GQ

“Zooms immediately into the pantheon of classics . . . a magical, melancholy story about friendship and the coming of age that marks the debut of an immensely talented writer . . . Mr. Harbach has the rare abilities to write with earnest, deeply felt emotion without ever veering into sentimentality, and to create quirky, vulnerable and fully imagined characters who instantly take up residence in our hearts and mind.” ―Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

“First novels this complete and consuming come along very, very seldom.” —Jonathan Franzen, New York Times–bestselling author of Crossroads

Chad Harbach is the author of the bestselling The Art of Fielding and a co-founder of n+1. He grew up in Wisconsin and attended Harvard and the University of Virginia. He lives in California.

To be published October 27, 2026 by Little, Brown and Company
672 pages
Hardcover
9780316455695