They're Going to Love You by Meg Howrey

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH • A BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK • A gripping novel set in the world of professional ballet, New York City during the AIDS crisis, and present-day Los Angeles. • “Beautiful…Howrey, a former dancer with the Joffrey Ballet, proves herself a talented choreographer in her own right…[A] finger-trap puzzle of a plot.”—New York Times Book Review

“They’re Going to Love You is my idea of a perfect book. It is about art, life, death, love, and family and it is beautifully and sharply written. I cried several times while reading it, and was sorry to let it go when I was done. I cannot recommend it enough.” —Jami Attenberg,  New York Times bestselling author of The Middlesteins and All This Could Be Yours

Throughout her childhood, Carlisle Martin got to see her father, Robert, for only a few precious weeks a year when she visited the brownstone apartment in Greenwich Village he shared with his partner, James. Brilliant but troubled, James gave Carlisle an education in all that he held dear in life—literature, music, and, most of all, dance.

Seduced by the heady pull of mentorship and hoping to follow in the footsteps of her mother—a former Balanchine ballerina—Carlisle’s aspiration to become a professional ballet dancer bloomed. But above all else, she longed to be asked to stay at the house on Bank Street, to be a part of Robert and James’s sophisticated world, even as the AIDS crisis brings devastation to their community. Instead, a passionate love affair created a rift between the family, with shattering consequences that reverberated for decades to come. Nineteen years later, when Carlisle receives a phone call that unravels the events of that fateful summer, she sees with new eyes how her younger self has informed the woman she’s become. 

They’re Going to Love You is a gripping and gorgeously written novel of heartbreaking intensity. With psychological precision and a masterfully revealed secret at its heart, it asks what it takes to be an artist in America, and the price of forgiveness, of ambition, and of love.

MEG HOWREY is the author of the novels The Wanderers, The Cranes Dance, Blind Sight, and most recently, They’re Going to Love You, which was a New York Times Best Book of the Month and a New Yorker Best Book of 2022. She is also the coauthor of the bestselling novels City of Dark Magic and City of Lost Dreams, published under the pen name Magnus Flyte. Her nonfiction has appeared in Vogue and The Los Angeles Review of Books. A former professional dancer, she currently lives in Los Angeles.

Author Residence: Los Angeles, CA