Come and Get It
One of 2024's hottest reads – chosen for Fearne Cotton's Happy Place Book Club
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3.6 • 31 Ratings
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
THE UNMISSABLE NEW NOVEL FROM THE AUTHOR OF BESTSELLING PHENOMENON SUCH A FUN AGE
*A 2024 Book of the Year for the Washington Post, New Yorker, Elle, Vulture and Harper's Bazaar*
* THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *
* FEARNE COTTON'S HAPPY PLACE BOOK CLUB PICK FOR FEBRUARY *
'I couldn't put it down, and I didn't want to either' EMILY HENRY
'The drama is just too juicy – how could anyone resist a binge?' GUARDIAN
'Razor-sharp … Packs a huge emotional punch' DAILY MAIL
Everything comes at a price. But not everything can be paid for…
Millie wants to graduate, get a job and buy a house. She's slowly saving up from her job on campus, but when a visiting professor offers her an unusual opportunity to make some extra money, she jumps at the chance.
Agatha is a writer, recovering from a break-up while researching attitudes towards weddings and money for her new book. She strikes gold when interviewing the girls in Millie's dorm, but her plans take a turn when she realises that the best material is unfolding behind closed doors.
As the two women form an unlikely relationship, they soon become embroiled in a world of roommate theatrics, vengeful pranks and illicit intrigue – and are forced to question just how much of themselves they are willing to trade to get what they want.
Sharp, intimate and provocative, Come and Get It takes a lens to our money-obsessed society in a tension-filled story about desire, consumption and bad behaviour.
'Smart, funny and perceptive' i
'A perfect read' STYLIST
'Wonderfully immersive, propulsive and beautifully paced' PAUL HARDING
'Quiet and intense … A joy to read' JESSICA GEORGE
'Witty and nuanced' RED
'[An] incisive novel everyone will be talking about' TOWN AND COUNTRY
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The lives of a visiting professor, a group of entitled scholarship students and their dormitory’s resident advisor collide and overlap until the friction triggers a combustion in the provocative new fiction from bestseller Kiley Reid. The action takes place in Fayetteville, and centres around the relationship between Agatha Paul, a creative non-fiction writer combining a teaching post at the University of Arkansas with research for a book on weddings and Millie Cousins, a 24-year-old marketing student and resident advisor who allows Agatha to eavesdrop on the students living in the dorm room adjoining her own. Although the unsympathetic renderings of Tyler—the de facto queen bee of the dorm room she shares with passive pedant, Peyton and coddled loner, Kennedy—and her friends Casey and Jenna make the young women villains on paper, the real bad behaviour comes from the adults in the story who really ought to know better. When the execution of a childish prank sets the main players at odds, it’s a tension-loaded countdown to the moment disaster strikes with almost resigned inevitability. Flipping between timelines, Reid injects context to inform the present-day actions and motives of her protagonists: the foundational weaknesses in Agatha’s relationship with her estranged wife, Millie’s desire for financial stability, the traumatising incident which ruptures Kennedy’s aspirations of young adulthood before it has really begun. The climactic final chapters dole out just desserts, but the moral ambiguity of each character puts the responsibility of answering the question of who is deserving and of what in the hands of the reader.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reid returns after her smash hit Such a Fun Age with a sardonic and no-holds-barred comedy of manners. When Agatha Paul, a white writer in her late 30s, arrives at the University of Arkansas as a visiting professor in 2017, she is separated from her wife, a Black dancer in Chicago, and intends to write a book about contemporary weddings. She switches topics, however, after interviewing a group of entitled young women who live in a dorm for scholarship students (one, named Jenna, who cashes in on a scholarship for Mexican Americans because her grandmother is Mexican, jokingly calls herself a "cute little refugee" and considers her work study salary "fun money"). The dorm's Black resident assistant Millie Cousins, who resents the others' shamelessness, agrees to let Agatha eavesdrop on them through a wall in exchange for $20 per session. There's also sensitive scholarship student Kennedy, who is so grotesquely spoiled by her mother that she must move into a single room to accommodate all her stuff. Overlaying the narrative of Agatha's clandestine project are backstories of the principal characters, which gradually reveal sources of their ongoing pain and push the story to an explosive climax. Reid is a keen observer—every page sparkles with sharp analysis of her characters. This blistering send-up of academia is interlaced with piercing moral clarity.
