The Most
  • Published: 12 November 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529928877
  • Imprint: Doubleday
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $29.99

The Most

Formats & editions
Paperback
30 Sep 2025
Hardback
12 Nov 2024
EBook
8 Aug 2024
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Mad Men meets On Chesil Beach. One unseasonably hot Sunday in November 1957, Kathleen Beckett, wife of insurance salesman Virgil Beckett – climbs into a swimming pool and refuses to get out. This day will change everything..

From 'one of our most thrilling and singular innovators on the page' (Laura Van Den Berg), a tightly wound, consuming tale about a 1950s American housewife, for fans of Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Franzen and Taffy Brodesser-Akner

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2024
A Barnes & Noble BEST BOOK of 2024
COSMOPOLITAN Novella of the Year 2024

'Clever, moving and unexpected. A brilliantly deft and subtle story.' - Emma Healey, author of Elizabeth is Missing

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A warm Sunday in November 1957. As Sputnik 2 orbits the earth, carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, a couple begin their day.

Virgil Beckett, an insurance salesman, isn’t particularly happy in his job but he fulfils the role, playing golf with the partners, drinking in the bar, chasing the women. Kathleen Beckett, once a promising tennis champion, with a key shot up her sleeve called ‘The Most’, is now a mother and homemaker.

Somehow these two, who have been together since college, have fallen into the roles expected of them – the prescribed suburban dream they have been sold as something to covet, something that will fulfil their lives. But on this unseasonably warm, early November Sunday, Kathleen wakes up and decides that she will not be accompanying her family to church.

No, she feels like a swim.

She unearths her old, red bathing suit and descends into the apartment complex pool no other resident uses. And she doesn’t want to come out…

___

Praise for Jessica Anthony's ENTER THE AARDVARK

'A truly fresh piece of art' Percival Everett

'Fresh, witty, smart' Kate Atkinson

'Highly inventive' Joshua Ferris

'A writer possessed of mind-bending talents' Heidi Julavits
  • Published: 12 November 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529928877
  • Imprint: Doubleday
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

About the author

Jessica Anthony

Jessica Anthony is the author of The Convalescent (McSweeney’s/Grove), a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, and Chopsticks (Razorbill), a multimedia novel created in collaboration with designer Rodrigo Corral. Chopsticks, was an Amazon Book of the Month and won App of the Year. Anthony’ short stories can be found in Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney’s, The Idaho Review and elsewhere. She is the inaugural winner of McSweeney’s “Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award,” and has recently received fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation for Innovative Literature, the Bogliasco Foundation in Bogliasco, Italy, and the Maine Arts Commission. Anthony has been a butcher in Alaska, an unlicensed masseuse in Poland, a secretary in San Francisco. In 2017, while writing Enter the Aardvark, her next novel, Anthony was working as “Bridge Guard,” guarding the Maria Valeria Bridge between Štúrovo, Slovakia and Esztergom, Hungary. Normally, she lives in Maine and teaches at Bates College.

portrait photo of Jessica Anthony

Also by Jessica Anthony

Enter the Aardvark
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Praise for The Most

Jessica Anthony’s The Most is a brilliant and startling domestic fable of longing… The Most is a novel of ruthless beauty. I read it in one perfect sitting.

Isle McElroy, author of People Collide

One of the most inventive writers working today

Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls

An exquisite, taut literary mousetrap

Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love

A 21st century literary classic waiting to happen

Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man

The Most charges the air like a thunderclap

Tomas Q.Morin, author of Machete

Sensational ... Readers won't want to put this down.

Publishers Weekly

Clever, moving and unexpected. A brilliantly deft and subtle story.

Emma Healey, author of Elizabeth is Missing

A fascinating, elegant read where not a single word is wasted

My Weekly

A riveting, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours

Sainsbury's Magazine

An utter joy, as crisp and unexpected as the surprisingly sunny November 1957 day over which it takes place. It is almost a distilled novel, and reads like a late, undiscovered masterpiece by John Cheever

Scotsman

Delivers on page-turning interior secrets

Observer

Jessica Anthony's spare, elegant novella... is darkly funny in its own way, and in the end is less a comedy than a smoldering, Cheeveresque mediation on mid-century, middle-class disappointment.

Washington Post

The Most blindsided me with its power….This superb short novel, about a marriage at its breakpoint, deserves to become a classic….Anthony has served an ace.

NPR.ORG

With this seemingly small act of female rebellion, novelist Jessica Anthony leads us into the secret upheaval of marriage, good-girl American society, and a silenced female fury and ambition. Get ready, readers. The Most is an exquisitely written, heady rush of story.

OPRAH DAILY

Witty, provocative, rich with insight and deep with melancholy ... The prose sizzles with intelligence and humour and there is great pathos too

Big Issue

In just 144 pages Anthony manages to convey the stifling atmosphere for women in the 1950s through the simple story of a housewife who chooses not to go to church that day and instead spends all her time in an unloved swimming pool, which she refuses to leave.

Cosmopolitan, 'Best Novella of 2024'
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