Peck & Peck

by Bonnie Garmus

The number one bestselling author of global sensation Lessons in Chemistry returns with an irresistible, delightful, and tender story about a young man whose life turns upside down when he is hired by the most prestigious, secretive, and dysfunctional poetry journal in the world: the renowned Peck & Peck of New York City.

Batter Gray is worried about his future. Even when he was eleven, his classmates seemed to have settled on a goal: doctor, lawyer, broker, engineer. Good jobs that automatically command respect, security, 401Ks. Now Batter is in his early twenties, living in New York City, and he wants something different; something that alienates some readers and bores most. Poetry. And yet—to him and exactly thirty-nine editors at a company called Peck & Peck—poetry not only represents the power of humanity but holds the key to its survival.

Batter is named after his mother’s heroic dog. An identical twin who lost his brother at birth, he finds himself confronted by the everyday dualities that make up life: right vs. wrong, truth vs. lies, rejection vs. acceptance. It’s almost as if his dead brother is a reminder: there are always two sides to every story.

No, wait. Make that three.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Books About Books, Adult, Poetry

547 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication October 13, 2026

About the author

Bonnie Garmus is a copywriter and creative director who’s worked widely in the fields of technology, medicine, and education. She’s an open-water swimmer, a rower, and mother to two pretty amazing daughters. Born in California and most recently from Seattle, she currently lives in London with her husband and her dog, 99.

Reviews

[Lisa of Troy]

A new book by Lessons in Chemistry author, Bonnie Garmus? I'm there!

[DianaRose]

literally beyond excited for the next book from bonnie garmus' genius mind — this time about a young man working at the most prestigious publishing house in nyc: peck & peck 🤭📝

[RaeLeigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved it! I don’t know if I like it better than Lessons, but it’s just as good for different reasons. I found it humorous yet profound, and everyone should read it.

[romanticslib]

My most anticipated release of the year!! I will read literally anything Bonnie Garmus writes.
I listened to a podcast interview she did about this book, and I'm super intrigued...

[Liz Hein · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really was enjoying this until it went completely off the rails and leaving me unsure of what Garmus sought out to do here.

[Aisha Faisal · Rating 4 out of 5]

What happens when a young man dreams of becoming a poet but finds himself operating three copiers inside the strangest literary magazine in New York? 4.5/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A special thank you to Kinokuniya Dubai for providing me with a copy of this book for review.

Peck and Peck by Bonnie Garmus is a highly anticipated second novel which centres on a young poet working at a quirky New York City literary magazine.

Batter Gray has never wanted the kind of career that promises money, security and respect. While everyone around him dreams of becoming a doctor, lawyer or engineer, Batter wants to become a poet.

His dream leads him into the strange and highly respected world of Peck & Peck, a famous poetry publication. What follows is a slow-burning story filled with humour, drama, rejection, secrets, suspense and unexpected twists.

Batter Gray grew up in Yuba City with an unusual name and the feeling that half of him was missing. He was born an identical twin, but his brother died at birth. His mother, Rainey, told him he was named after a heroic dog, although Batter never fully understood what that name meant.

In his early twenties, Batter moved to New York and lied to his parents about working in a print shop. In reality, he had entered the strange world of Peck & Peck's secretive and highly respected poetry quarterly.

His job was not glamorous. He spent his days operating three copiers inside a converted bomb shelter. Above him, thirty-nine editors argued about poems, commas and quail eggs. The office felt like a beautiful literary cult, complete with marble stairs, alphabet-shaped plants and a pneumatic tube system racing through the building.

Rainey was easily my favourite character. She is outspoken, clever, wounded and wonderfully exhausting. She can begin a conversation about being late and somehow travel through Christopher Columbus, typography, and Macy’s before finally criticizing Batter’s posture. Her long speeches are hilarious, although a few occasionally feel too heavy.

The middle of the book is slow, and some of the many editors are difficult to tell apart. A shorter version might have made the mystery feel sharper. Still, the final part rewards your patience as hidden truths begin to change everything you thought you understood.

Beneath the workplace comedy lies a thoughtful story about identity, grief, ambition, and the names we inherit. Batter believes he is searching for permission to become a poet, but he is really searching for the truth about his family and himself. Batter wanted to be taken seriously as a poet, but Peck & Peck seemed designed to reject people like him. As he tried to find his place, he became caught up in workplace politics, family secrets, romance, and a mystery that would eventually lead to his becoming Prisoner 83A0956.

Strange, funny, melancholy and completely original, Peck & Peck may not be perfect, but it has a voice unlike anything else I have read. 📚If you appreciate an expertly maneuvered plot, winding tales, and a narrative that strikes a deep chord in the heart, go ahead and pre-order this one. You're going to want it on your shelf.

[Carol Scheherazade · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is DELICIOUS! Oh my. A little corny but I love corn. 🌽 The WHOLE TIME I was reading it, I wore a huge grin. There are so many great parts, put together into a PERFECT read. Such fun characters you want to befriend them , love them, hate them, BE THEM. Laughter, shock, tears, joy. All of it. DARE I SAY BETTER THAN LESSONS.. ???? You bet I do!!!!
Chapter 81. First line. Perfect quote.

[Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started quite strong but reeeaaalllly dragged for the second half ?? quite disappointing

[Cynthia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I very much looked forward to reading this second novel by Bonnie Garmus. Lessons in Chemistry was an amazing reading surprise. This second novel disappointed me. The first half of the novel is very slow, a bit tedious, but I persisted. Much more activity in the second half, but it wasn’t enough to overcome my initial reaction.

[Erin Fitzsimons · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️

[Lexy Nelson]

I have eagerly been awaiting more Garmus novels since Lessons in Chemistry! October, you cannot come soon enough :)

[Sam Kirkwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Life is full of judgment, but that doesn’t mean the judges are always right.”

Please excuse me while I nurse this book hangover for the next 5-10 business days.

[Amy Soe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a delightful read ✨

[Tina Panik · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute delight! Garmus creates a world where poetry is beloved, families are complicated, and a dog (once again) saves the day. Fans will be delighted at this creative, enjoyable world.

This was an ARC.

[Lara Nurney · Rating 4 out of 5]

It must be incredibly difficult to write a second novel that lives up to readers’ enormous expectations, especially when you’re Bonnie Garmus and your debut was Lessons in Chemistry.

But Peck & Peck pulls it off! It’s a triumph of story telling, with excellent and unforgettable characters, and a celebration of the arts.

A love letter to poetry, this novel is narrated by the excellently named Batter Gray. It’s the 1980s in New York City and Batter is a recent graduate with a skill no one values - an ‘ear’ for poetry. Anxious about his future, Batter unexpectedly lands a dream job at prestigious poetry quarterly Peck & Peck only to become embroiled in a secret war between the famous Peck twin brothers.

For me it didn’t quite have the dazzle and poignancy of Lessons in Chemistry, but this is still a charming and bubbly novel that will lift your mood in seconds. Garmus has again dusted off a subject that, let’s be frank, some might dismiss as niche and unsexy turning it into something stylish, witty and captivating. While the story becomes quite theatrical and the pace rushed, I loved the eccentric cast of characters and their many peculiarities. I also admired the allegorical threads connecting Batter, Peck & Peck, and the egg symbolism.

I predict Batter Gray is going to become as iconic as Elizabeth Zott.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fresh, funny and full of heart (4.5 stars)

[Clarisse · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are expecting anything like her first novel, please don’t. This is completely different from her debut and I must say a very refreshing take on poetry arts.

We met Batter Gray whose name honours his mother’s heroic dog.  However he didn’t like it because everyone assumed it was just a nickname.

When he was young, Batter always dreamed of being a poet, even though his teachers and parents kept pushing him to consider other options, ones that would allow him to make a living. 

Working as a copier at Peck & Peck, he uncovered a wealth of drama and secrets among his colleagues.

The homage to poetry and the beauty of typeface were truly lovely.  I laughed throughout this witty and original novel. 

This was a refreshing departure from Lessons in Chemistry showcasing the author’s versatility in tackling diverse subjects and styles. I thoroughly enjoyed the nerdy focus on typeface and publishing angle of this book. This was such a fun novel and a must read for every Bonnie Garmus Fans!

[Elisabeth Casén Pihl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a masterpiece. I love Batter.

[Isabelle Low · Rating 4 out of 5]

loved it!! I never read Garmus’s first book, but I only ever heard amazing things, and this second novel really lived up to the hype!! It was full of twists and turns, always keeping me guessing :)

thank you to Simon & Schuster for the ARC! I’m so grateful 🫶🏻

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I need to gather my thoughts . .
But what I can say is Bonnie Garmus you are an auto buy author!

[Rachel M · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book charmed me with its premise and tone. But ai have to say; the first part was stronger than the second. A lot was going on, the story was spilling over and I didn’t know where we were going. Sometimes, a book will go in all sorts of directions but the dénouement will be meticulously woven in a satisfactory way. It wasn’t the case here. Things were resolved and explained but it felt simultaneously painstakingly long and rushed. I believe this represents the weakness of the story: it lacks balance.

Maybe more adventurous readers will enjoy it more. I still think this was an entertaining book. 3 stars.

This ARC was provided by the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for my honest opinion.

[Scott Breslove · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let me preface this by saying I didn’t read Ms. Garmus’ first book, so I really had no expectations going in to this one. This book was equal parts absurd, funny, heartwarming, emotional, and well written, with some emphasis on the absurd, I mean, what’s with that dog anyway? Lol. A great cast of very idiosyncratic characters and absurd (there’s that word again) situations. Despite what my review might have you think, I did really enjoy this book and raced through the last quarter to see where it all finally ended up. Definitely enjoyed it more than I thought I would, and loved all the little trivia factoids sprinkled within.

[Briana Gagnon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is like a 3.99, I can’t say I can give it a full four stars

The beginning hooked me, the middle lost me, and the end brought me back again.

This is very different than lessons in chemistry! I loved many of the characters in this book. Batter was flawed yet endearing.

If you enjoy a very slow burn character driven story, this is for you!

[livi thrasher]

i really liked this! wasn’t expecting it to be as funny as LIC but it was a breath of fresh air.

[The Bookish Elf · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a particular kind of novel that wants to be read aloud, ideally at a kitchen table with strong coffee and someone willing to laugh in the right places. Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus is precisely that book. Four years after Lessons in Chemistry turned a chemist named Elizabeth Zott into a household saint, Garmus returns with a story about a young man who wants to spend his life on the least practical art form ever invented. She writes about poetry the way she once wrote about cooking: as a stand-in for everything that matters and almost nothing the modern world will pay for.

The Setup: A Boy, a Dog, and a Quarterly That Hates You

Batter Gray is a Yuba City kid raised by Rainey, a type designer who treats Helvetica as a moral statement, and John, a community college historian who carries every televised tragedy like a private bruise. Batter is an identical twin minus the twin. He is also named after a dog his mother insists was a heart-stopping hero. By his early twenties he has fled to New York, lied to his parents about a print shop job, and somehow talked his way into Peck & Peck, a famously secretive poetry quarterly run out of a triangle of Manhattan real estate that looks like a greenhouse and behaves like a cult.

What he actually does there, at first, is run three copiers in a converted bomb shelter. Above him, thirty-nine editors and one Editor in Chief argue about commas, eggs, and which young hopeful deserves a spot in the slim leather-bound quarterly that arrives, every issue, wrapped in the image of a single glowing quail egg.

Voice and Style: Garmus Doesn't Sound Like Anyone Else

This is where the novel earns its keep. The voice in Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus is a first-person, slightly older Batter looking back on the year that changed everything, and the result reads less like a novel than a long, funny, anxious confession told over a bar. Garmus writes sentences that ricochet between joke and grief inside a single paragraph. A line about why parents never want a poet for a son sits beside a line about a stillborn brother, and somehow neither feels engineered.

Dialogue as Architecture

Her dialogue is the real flex. Conversations between Batter and his mother are running ten-rounders of digression. Rainey can begin with the failure of school punctuality, detour through Christopher Columbus, the etymology of "discover," the ergonomics of Macy's at Herald Square, and arrive at a chastisement about your posture without losing her thread. It is exhausting in the best way. Garmus has clearly grown more confident in the comic monologue since Lessons in Chemistry. She lets her characters talk longer and trusts the reader to keep up.

What Works Beautifully

Five things this novel does better than almost any literary comedy on the shelves right now:

Rainey Gray is one of the year's great mothers. She is opinionated, secretly wounded, frequently absurd, and never sentimentalized. Her relationship with grief, which the book unpacks slowly, is the emotional engine of the whole thing.
The Peck & Peck offices themselves are practically a character. The Aviary, the marble staircase, the alphabetic topiaries, the pneumatic chute system that hurls cylinders past the basement at the speed of a small bull. Garmus has built a literary New York fever dream and then sketched it with such tactile detail you can almost smell the toner.
The 1980s setting is handled with restraint. No nostalgia karaoke, no laundry list of references. Just the right amount of IBM Selectrics, payphone messages, and AZT-era worry to make the period feel lived in.
The workplace satire is sharp without being mean. Salton Peck, the tyrannical Editor in Chief, is funny in a way that does not let him off the hook morally.
There is a love story that genuinely earns its swoons, and you will not see its full shape until late in the book.
Where the Novel Hits a Few Speed Bumps

In the interest of honesty, Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus is not flawless, and pretending otherwise would do Garmus a disservice. The book occasionally suffers from the same condition as its protagonist: it has trouble committing to one thing at a time. Several issues stand out for a reader who already loves Garmus and wants this to be even better than it is.

The middle section sags. Once Batter is settled into the copy room and the office politics get rolling, the plot enters a long holding pattern in which similar comic beats repeat. A leaner edit by perhaps fifty pages would have sharpened the ending.
Some of the side editors blur together. Peck & Peck employs forty editors by design, but in narrative practice that is too many. A few feel sketched rather than fully drawn.
Rainey's monologues, much as I loved them, occasionally tip from charming digression into authorial soapbox. Garmus has things to say about typography, history, women's medicine, and American hypocrisy, and Rainey is the willing megaphone.
The mystery elements teased in the opening lines, including the question of why Batter ends up Prisoner 83A0956, are dangled early and resolved very late. The payoff is strong, but the wait stretches a beat too long.

None of this sinks the book. It just keeps it from the genuine knockout that Lessons in Chemistry turned out to be.

The Beating Heart: Identity, Duality, and Earning a Name

What lifts Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus above its workplace comedy bones is the quiet conviction that names matter, that they are a kind of inheritance you either live up to or unlive your way out of. Batter spends the book trying to understand what his name actually means. The truth he uncovers, when it lands, reframes everything we have read. It is a novel about a young man searching for permission to take poetry seriously, but underneath that it is a novel about the parents who shape us through omission as much as instruction, and about the strange comfort of being one half of a pair that history erased before you arrived.

A Study in Doubles

The motif of doubles runs through every layer of the novel. Twin protagonists. Twin Peck brothers. Twin desks pushed back to back. Twin lions outside the New York Public Library. Right versus wrong. Truth versus lie. Garmus uses the architecture of duality without ever calling attention to it, and that restraint is its own quiet triumph.

Who Should Read This Book

This one will land especially hard for readers who:

Loved Lessons in Chemistry but want something slightly stranger and more melancholy.
Have ever worked at a place that took itself far too seriously.
Care about poetry, typography, or the dignity of small, unprofitable obsessions.
Believe a well-written mother can carry an entire novel.

Final Thoughts

Garmus has written a second novel that does not chase the success of her first. It is smaller in plot, looser in shape, and richer in voice. There are moments in Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus where the prose is so loose and so happy with itself you can almost hear the author laughing in the next room, and there are other moments, especially anywhere Rainey opens her mouth or anywhere a quail egg is mentioned, where the book quietly breaks your heart. It does not entirely cohere. It does not have to. Like the quarterly at its center, this novel is interested in originality, beauty, and substance, and it lands two of those three without breaking a sweat.

[Judy Bettencourt · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[Laura Glasgow · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a gift it was to read (devour) Peck and Peck! I’m at a loss for words right now, but hope to write a proper review soon.

[Sarah Schwartz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bonnie Garmus is at it again!!! This was such a unique novel. I've honestly never read anything like it. I feel like poetry can be polarizing and this book definitely explored that idea. The MC is obsessed with the genre, but no one in his life can understand why. This book has a lot of fun character antics and in a way, it's giving Only Murders in the Building level of quirky. Absolute delight.

Thank you to Edelweiss for the ARC copy.

[Shannon A · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s the 1980’s and Batter Grey can’t avoid his mother’s outlandish stories or his insatiable love for poetry. He can’t even decide on a major for college, and still ends up with his dream job…maybe?

What transpires is a smart, laugh-out-loud tale of words, rivalry, fire and a bit of crime.

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

thank you, bonnie