My Nemesis

My Nemesis is the brilliant third novel by Charmaine Craig, the acclaimed author of Miss Burma. It is set largely in Los Angeles, where it focuses on an intellectual affair between two married writers and confronts ideas of race and womanhood. Craig inhabits the first-person voice of her unreliable narrator Tessa—a white woman with a somewhat fixed idea of womanhood and feminism. Tessa develops a sense of antagonism in the novel to Wah, a mixed-race Asian woman who expresses a more traditional sense of femininity than Tessa is able to respect. As Tessa’s antipathy grows over the course of the novel, Craig lays bare the danger of adherence to a single perspective and brilliantly explores the importance of cultivating true empathy when confronted with differences in point of view or experience. Miss Burma was longlisted for the National Book Award and the Woman’s Prize for Fiction. It received rave reviews in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, Elle, among many others, and has sold almost 30,000 copies in all formats. Rights have been sold in eleven other territories, including to Grove Press UK. My Nemesis is at once a novel of intellect and ideas—particularly about how a woman should exist in the world—but it is also a cinematic and compulsively readable page turner about an affair that threatens to upend two families. It will appeal to fans of writers as different as Leïla Slimani, Elena Ferrante, Lauren Groff, and Katie Kitamura. Compared to Craig’s previous two novels, which were both historical fiction, My Nemesis is an exciting departure for her in its ultra-contemporary setting and its short length. Craig particularly wanted to write a short, 50,000-word novel, as that was the length to which she found herself most drawn in her own reading during the pandemic. Craig has fans in Viet Thanh Nguyen, Maaza Mengiste, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, Laila Lalami, and Aminatta Forna for her previous work, and we will call on her wide network of supporters and admirers for blurbs. There is already early film/TV interest for My Nemesis.