PRAISE FOR BEFORE THE FALL: "[A] terrific thriller . . . an irresistible mystery . . . a tale that's both an intriguing puzzle and a painful story of human loss."—Washington Post "Savvy and absorbing . . . cathartic . . . BEFORE THE FALL is about the gulf that separates perception and truth."—Wall Street Journal
“A mesmerizing, surprise-jammed mystery that works purely on its own, character-driven terms.”
—New York Times "A masterly blend of mystery, suspense, tragedy, and shameful media hype . . . a gritty tale of a man overwhelmed by unwelcome notoriety, with a stunning, thoroughly satisfying conclusion."—Publishers Weekly "I started and finished BEFORE THE FALL in one day. That begins to tell you what kind of smart, compellingly dramatic read it is. So read it."—James Patterson, #1 New York Times bestselling author "This is one of the year's best suspense novels, a mesmerizing, surprise-jammed mystery that works purely on its own, character-driven terms . . . Mr. Hawley has made it very, very easy to race through his book in a state of breathless suspense."—New York Times "BEFORE THE FALL is a ravishing and riveting beauty of a thriller. It's also a deep exploration of desire, betrayal, creation, family, fate, mortality, and rebirth. It's one part Dennis Lehane, one part Dostoevsky. I was spellbound from first page to last; I haven't fully recovered yet."—Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours "Noah Hawley really knows how to keep a reader turning the pages, but there's more to the novel than suspense. On one hand, BEFORE THE FALL is a complex, compulsively readable thrill ride of a novel. On the other hand, it is an exploration of the human condition, a meditation on the vagaries of human nature, the dark side of celebrity, the nature of art, the power of hope and the danger of an unchecked media. The combination is a potent, gritty thriller that exposes the high cost of news as entertainment and the randomness of fate."—Kristin Hannah , New York Times Book Review "Imagine that Agatha Christie had set a closed-room mystery on an airplane and included Wall Street and entertainment executive types in her lineup of suspects. Now imagine that airplane crashing into the Atlantic before the story even gets going....Mr. Hawley, the expert TV showrunner, obviously had the skills to pull this off."—New York Times "A pulse-pounding story, grounded in humanity."—Booklist (starred review) "BEFORE THE FALL is an astonishing, character-driven tour-de-force. The story is a multi-layered, immersive examination of truth, relationships, and our unquenchable thirst for the media's immediate explanation of unfathomable tragedy."—Karin Slaughter, #1 internationally bestselling author "BEFORE THE FALL kicks ass. A surefire summer read." —Justin Cronin, New York Times bestselling author of The Passage and City of Mirrors "Like the successful screenwriter that he is, Hawley piles on enough intrigues and plot complications to keep you hooked."—Kirkus "This isn't just a good novel; it's a great one. I trusted no one in these pages, yet somehow cared about them all. BEFORE THE FALL brings a serrated edge to every character, every insight, and every wicked twist."—Brad Meltzer, bestselling author of The President's Shadow "Noah Hawley soon veers his highly entertaining novel into an insightful look at families, revenge and media intrusion...Hawley invests the same care with a soupcon of dark humor into BEFORE THE FALL as he does on the TV series 'Fargo'...superb and cleverly constructed."—Associated Press "A riveting beach read."—People "[A] page-turner."—Vanity Fair "A remarkable and memorable accomplishment by any standard...BEFORE THE FALL is brilliantly constructed and wonderfully told.... a tale that will haunt you long after you read the last page, even as you wish the narrative was twice as long, for all the right reasons."—Book Reporter "Abundant chills and thrills...Noah Hawley's novel grabs you by the throat and won't let go...BEFORE THE FALL is storytelling at its best, as Hawley presents a range of diverse characters with rich histories... Seeds of doubt are cast in what is sure to be the summer book you won't want to miss."—The Missourian "In the hands of a writer like Noah Hawley, who knows how to build tension from mundane moments, it is a remarkable thriller that most readers will find difficult to put down...it moves toward a breathless ending."—The Washington Times "A complex exploration of human nature in an age of celebrity."—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "Won [our] hearts and minds...it will be the big talker of the summer."—New York Post, "Summer's Hottest Reads" "[The] thriller of the summer."—The Baltimore Sun "The crash and the flashbacks recall Lost and Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer-winning novel, The Bridge Over San Luis Rey , and Scott's travails are the lot of every hero in a conspiratorial thriller going back to The 39 Steps ."—Slate "BEFORE THE FALL will seize you on the first page and never let you go, as you follow the story of a plane crash and the complicated and confusing investigation about why it happened."—Vanity Fair, "The 5 Must-Read Books for the Last Five Weeks of Summer" "A thoughtful and compelling page-turner....Hawley's writing is taut and clear, his characters richly developed...Readers may be moved to stand up and cheer."—New York Journal of Books "Excellent premise and clever plotting."—Florida Times-Union
★ 11/01/2021
At the start of this grim, thought-provoking near-future thriller from Hawley (Before the Fall ), five Wisconsin teenagers die by suicide in less than two weeks, each writing "A11" somewhere near where their bodies are found. The plague spreads nationwide and then internationally, creating a mind-numbing death count. Adults struggle to understand what's happening, some theorizing that the fatalities are a consequence of the Covid pandemic's social isolation. Many fear the suicides represent an "act of collective surrender" presaging the extinction of humanity. Meanwhile, 15-year-old Simon Oliver, who found his older sister dead from overdosing on the opioids their family business manufactured, is told by a fellow resident of the Float Anxiety Abatement Center near Chicago, who calls himself the Prophet, that Oliver is central to establishing a new utopia to be started by children to save the species and the planet. Oliver joins the Prophet and some others in escaping from Float to realize the Prophet's vision. From the ominous sentence that opens the main narrative ("The summer our children began to kill themselves was the hottest in history"), the author creates an all-too-plausible dystopia rendered believable through matter-of-fact prose. Hawley makes this sing by combining the social commentary of a Margaret Atwood novel with the horrors of a Stephen King book. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (Jan.)
03/01/2022
Set in the near future, where children understand that adults have focused on the negatives—money, greed, self-importance, etc.—with disastrous results, Hawley's (Before the Fall ) latest is an apocalyptic and provocative glimpse of what could be. The story follows a small group of rebellious young people on a rescue mission after they break out of the Float Anxiety Abatement Center: Simon, trying to recover from his sister Claire's death; The Prophet, who tells Simon about the man they must stop, The Wizard; and Louise, another young person at the Center. Veteran stage actor Shiromi Arserio delivers a solid reading of this story filled with challenging issues; Hawley reads the op-ed-style sections, where the author stops the story to talk directly to the listener. VERDICT This dystopian tale concerns difficult topics, but is full of drama, thrills, and insights, leaving listeners with a sense that change is still possible. Fans of Stephen King's The Stand will enjoy the tale.—Denise Garofalo
08/01/2021
Award-winning screenwriter/director/producer Hawley's recent Before the Fall won lavish love, New York Times best-selling credentials, and both Edgar and ITW thriller honors. So it's no surprise that his new literary thriller is being billed as the first big novel of 2022. With opioid addiction, environmental devastation, and clownface-dabbed vigilantes corroding their surroundings, U.S. teens desperately communicate with memes only they know and understand. Seeking to mend his grief over his sister's death, Simon Oliver attends the Float Anxiety Abatement Center near Chicago, where he meets Louise and The Prophet and joins in their wild-hare quest to free a young woman from a dangerous man called The Wizard. Immediate concerns within an ageless mission-driven, phantasmagorical format.
Author and screenwriter Noah Hawley’s latest dystopian thriller, set in the near future, is a gripping yet distressing and profound listening experience. After teen suicide becomes prevalent in the U.S., a group of teens go on a mission to save a destructive and brutal society that is focused on greed and ego. It is divided between The Party of Truth and The Party of Lies. Narrator Shiromi Arserio provides an expressive, youthful, and velvety tone throughout the cryptic plot. Hawley, more stoic in nature, speaks during pivotal moments, providing commentary that evokes an existential response. A rapid plot, dramatic characterizations, and a horrific but believable setting will excite thriller fans and have them questioning where today’s society is headed. D.Z. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
DECEMBER 2021 - AudioFile
2021-10-27 The young heir to a pharmaceutical fortune and his friends band together to bring down an evil billionaire in Hawley’s near-future thriller.
It’s a few years after the Covid-19 pandemic, and things in America have not been going well. Political strife continues to worsen as climate change progresses, and all of a sudden teenagers start dying of suicide in droves. Simon Oliver’s older sister, Claire, was one of these cases, overdosing on the very opioids produced by their family’s company. In the months after Claire’s death, Simon becomes so anxious his parents have him admitted to a high-end mental health facility for the children of the wealthy. There, a mysterious boy who goes by the name the Prophet convinces Simon to escape the hospital with a few other misfits. Louise, one such misfit, tells Simon of “the Wizard,” a Jeffrey Epstein–like figure named E.L. Mobley. Like Epstein, Mobley is notorious for abusing young girls and getting away with it because he has too much money to be held accountable. The Prophet believes Mobley must be brought down, but what can a group of kids do against a vicious billionaire? Hawley is a TV veteran, and he knows how to quickly establish character, maintain pacing, and write excellent action scenes. But this very long book is stuffed with far too many characters, half-developed ideas, and asides from the author that would be more at home in an op-ed than a novel. Almost everyone who's mentioned gets a chapter from their own perspective, resulting in either a promising thread that goes nowhere or a passage that could easily have been skipped without losing anything pertinent to the story.
Simultaneously too much and not enough.