Fair Ones

by Lydia Millet

From the best-selling author of A Children’s Bible , a story of friends, shock, and survival.

Lydia Millet’s dialogue-driven, fast-moving double novel Fair Ones follows two Brooklyn women in their forties reeling from the sudden and baffling death of their friend Claire. Fair, Mara’s account, opens in the wake of initial shock as she and Jen try to come to grips with the enigma of Claire’s killing. Ones, told from Jen’s point of view, picks up a year later as she and Mara wrestle with new relationships and old secrets.

In this vibrant, funny-sad fiction of companionship and solitude, Millet dazzles with dry wit and sharp prose. The narrators’ inner and outer conversations—and their ongoing entanglement with the memories of Claire—explore the ways we create and define ourselves through others. Fair Ones is a love song to the intricate annoyances of families both chosen and unchosen—and to the banality, bombast, and humble beauties of midlife friendships.

400 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication October 6, 2026

About the author

Lydia Millet has written twelve works of fiction. She has won awards from PEN Center USA and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her books have been longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and named as New York Times Notable Books. Her story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She lives outside Tucson, Arizona.