At first glance, the premise sounds deceptively familiar: a seventeen-year-old girl named Waldo begins an affair with her middle-aged creative writing teacher, Mr. Teddy Korgy. On paper, it risks sounding like another contemporary “taboo relationship” novel built to provoke discourse and little else. However, in reality, Half His Age is far more psychologically precise than that. It's not romantic fantasy masquerading as literary fiction.

P.J. Larkin is a writer on the brink of giving up, her manuscript rejected, her patience worn thin. George Dunn is everything she is not: established, successful, suddenly flush with a million-dollar deal for a novel that looks, at least from the outside, uncomfortably familiar. What happens next is impulsive, almost careless—a social media post—and yet it detonates with absolute precision. Careers begin to unravel. Narratives take shape. Sides are chosen long before facts ha