They're Going to Love You: A Novel

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR’S CHOICE • A BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK • A gripping novel set in the world of professional ballet, New York City during the AIDS crisis, & present-day Los Angeles. • 

“Beautiful…Howrey, a former dancer with the Joffrey Ballet, proves herself a talented choreographer in her own right…[A] finger-trap puzzle of a plot.”— New York Times Book Review

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Throughout her childhood, Carlisle Martin got to see her father, Robert, for only a few precious weeks a year when she visited the brownstone apartment in Greenwich Village he shared with his partner, James. Brilliant but troubled, James gave Carlisle an education in all that he held dear in life—literature, music, and, most of all, dance.

Seduced by the heady pull of mentorship & hoping to follow in the footsteps of her mother—a former Balanchine ballerina—Carlisle’s aspiration to become a professional ballet dancer bloomed. But above all else, she longed to be asked to stay at the house on Bank Street, to be a part of Robert & James’s sophisticated world, even as the AIDS crisis brings devastation to their community. Instead, a passionate love affair created a rift between the family, with shattering consequences that reverberated for decades to come. 19 years later, when Carlisle receives a phone call that unravels the events of that fateful summer, she sees with new eyes how her younger self has informed the woman she’s become. 

They’re Going to Love You is a gripping & gorgeously written novel of heartbreaking intensity. With psychological precision & a masterfully revealed secret at its heart, it asks what it takes to be an artist in America, & the price of forgiveness, of ambition, & of love.

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MEG HOWREY is the author of the novels The Wanderers, The Cranes Dance, & Blind Sight. She is also the coauthor of the bestselling novels City of Dark Magic & City of Lost Dreams, published under the pen name Magnus Flyte.