The Au Pair

by Teddy Wayne

Award-winning author Teddy Wayne follows the tremendous critical success of his breakout sensation The Winner—a New York Times Top Ten Thriller of the Year—with another seductively twisty page-turner about the explosive impact of a beautiful Norwegian au pair on a celebrated novelist and his wife.

Steven Hammer was once an acclaimed literary star. Now, his career is floundering, his marriage to a high-powered woman is crumbling, and the only bright spot in his life is Astrid, the Norwegian au pair who cares for their children—and reveres his neglected novels. But what begins as a secret infatuation soon spirals into a scandal that makes them both infamous.

As a headline-grabbing trial captivates the world with a salacious story of sex, power, and betrayal, Steven must confront the wreckage he’s created—and the deeper insecurities that fueled it. Is Astrid an innocent young woman caught up in a case beyond her control, or a calculating femme fatale? And how far will he go, driven by desperation and obsession, for her professed love?

With breakneck pacing and dagger-sharp prose, Teddy Wayne’s The Au Pair is an electrifying literary thriller about desire, deception, and the unraveling of a man as he grapples with his fading relevance—where nothing is as it seems, and the truth may be more fantastical than the lies we tell ourselves.

Genres: Fiction, Suspense

272 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication June 30, 2026

About the author

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels "The Winner" (2024), "The Great Man Theory" (2022), "Apartment" (2020), "Loner" (2016), "The Love Song of Jonny Valentine" (2013) and "Kapitoil" (2010) and is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize runner-up, and a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award finalist and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.