Author Talk: 'The Amateur' by Best-Selling Author Chris Bohjalian
Event Details
What if a single moment changed the course of your life?
The Westport Library welcomes #1 New York Times best-selling author Chris Bohjalian to the stage for a conversation with CT Public's Catherine Shen on his gripping new novel, The Amateur — a suspenseful and emotionally charged story about tragedy, privilege, secrets, and the devastating ripple effects of one split-second mistake.
When an 18-year-old golf prodigy accidentally kills a teenage caddy with a stray ball, what initially appears to be a freak accident quickly unravels into something far more complicated. As an investigation exposes hidden relationships, long-buried secrets, and a community eager to assign blame, one young woman finds herself at the center of a scandal that threatens to define the rest of her life.
Part courtroom drama, part psychological suspense, and part coming-of-age story, The Amateur explores how quickly a life can change — and what happens when a community's version of the truth collides with reality.
Books will be available for purchase and signing.
“The Amateur is a joyous novel with an unforgettable narrator who will break your heart. It is sharply funny, beautifully told and so moving on the way life can upend itself in a single moment. I adored it.” —
If you're participating in our 2026 Summer Reading Challenge, this book fulfills the following categories:
- A book that has a Westport connection
- A book about a birth or a death
- A book about family rivalry
- A book about about mistaken identity
- A book with a totally unhinged character
Click here for more information on all 25 categories!
About The Amateur
1978: It is the first Thursday in August and temperatures are flirting with 90 when Mira Winston, eighteen years old, drives a golf ball from her tee toward the practice net near the clubhouse and caddy shack. The golf ball, weighing 1.6 ounces, tears through the net, traveling 150 miles per hour, and slams, with sickening force, into the temple of a high school junior named Kenny Foster, rupturing an artery and unleashing a torrent of blood. Kenny brings his hand to the side of his head, then topples onto his side. He’s dead before the ambulance even arrives.
In the wake of this terrible accident—and everyone, at first, agrees it was an accident—Mira looks for comfort in all the wrong places: in her lover, Theo Catton, a married man three decades her senior. In her mother, a well-kept woman with secrets of her own. In the dead caddy’s little sisters, girls bewildered by grief. But when the investigators look more closely at the torn net, when a detective recalls Mira’s history of recklessness, and when Kenny’s father spies Mira with her married lover, the affluent and mannered community turns on this once-promising young woman.
A gripping story that takes the reader from the sun-soaked greens of a tony Westchester country club to the fluorescent-lit stand of a county courtroom, The Amateur asks: What happens when one small moment—a swing, a ball, a piece of string—changes the course of an entire life?
About the Author
Chris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 24 books. His work has been translated into 35 languages and become three movies (Midwives, Secrets of Eden, and Past the Bleachers), and the hit TV series, The Flight Attendant. His books have been selections of Oprah’s Book Club, the Barnes & Noble Book Club, and been selected as Best Books of the Year by numerous magazines and newspapers. Some of his most recent awards include the Walter Cerf Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts, the Sarah Josepha Hale Literary Award, and a finalist for Best Short Story from the International Thriller Writers association. He has written for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, Reader’s Digest, and The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. He lives in Vermont with his wife, photographer Victoria Blewer.
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