My Dark Vanessa

The novel opens in 2017 as 30-year-old Vanessa Wye refreshes her Facebook page over and over as she gets ready for work. Later, Vanessa makes her way to a hotel lobby in Portland, Maine, and takes her position at the concierge desk where she works. During a break, she receives a call on her cell phone from a man named Jacob Strane. Strane reveals that his employer, a school called Browick in Norumbega, Maine, is reopening an investigation into Strane’s relationship with a former student named Taylor Birch who has accused Strane of sexual assault. Within months of this conversation, Strane takes his own life, unable to cope with the public exposure after other accusers come forward. With the help of her therapist, Vanessa faces the possibility that she has more in common with Taylor Birch than she is comfortable admitting. Seventeen years earlier, Strane was Vanessa’s 42-year-old English teacher. As an adult, Vanessa is certain that their relationship is the most important, passionate love affair she has ever experienced; by the end of the novel, she begins to understand that their relationship was abusive and that she, like Taylor Birch, was a victim of sexual assault.