Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.

Determined to put on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised and cost her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging Macbeth instead.

And now, she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theater director. The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. Miranda Fitch’s life is a waking nightmare. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, ROUGE holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.įrom the author of Bunny, which Margaret Atwood hails as “genius,” comes a “wild, and exhilarating” (Lauren Groff) novel about a theater professor who is convinced staging Shakespeare’s most maligned play will remedy all that ails her-but at what cost? With black humor and seductive horror, ROUGE explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry-as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror-and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa her mother to which her mother was devoted. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. Can she escape her mother’s fate-and find a connection that is more than skin deep?įor as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. From the critically acclaimed author of BUNNY comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother's unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty.

Mona awad