A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025

From the celebrated poet and author of the critically acclaimed novel Inverno comes a mesmerizing new novel, Estate.

Caroline, separated from her husband, finds herself drawn to Lorenzo, who has not one but two other lovers. During a summer of erotic intensity and crisis, Caroline speaks, recording the stories of seduction, deception, and make-believe that she and Lorenzo tell each other-but how true are any of them?

Sweeping across time and space, Estate is a tightly compressed tour de force in which Caroline sees revelations and responsibilities collide. From New Guinea to word games, Italian cinema to communication theory, Cynthia Zarin's refractive, mirrorlike novel charts the exigencies of desire, bringing to mind the work of Annie Ernaux and Clarice Lispector and illustrating how a person can disappear in a hall of stories and reflections.

Many of your stories are about this, how you acquired the last thing you wanted, says Caroline to Lorenzo. But what does Caroline want? How elastic is love? Of Zarin's previous novel, Inverno, Sigrid Nunez wrote in The New York Times, "To see the chaos of suffering shaped into something beautiful is one of the main reasons we turn to art." In Estate, a summer counterpart to wintry Inverno, Caroline reassembles her field of vision from a trove of gleaming shards.

Shockingly intense and psychologically penetrating, Cynthia Zarin is a writer of passionate insight, and a formidable new presence in American fiction.