The Winner: A Novel

Conor O’Toole, a young tennis instructor from Yonkers, spends the summer in Cutters Neck, an exclusive Cape Cod community, teaching wealthy residents in exchange for free lodging. Struggling financially, he accepts a lucrative offer from Catherine, a sharp-tongued divorcée, that soon turns into a secret, erotic affair. At the same time, he falls for a free-spirited young woman he meets on the beach, juggling both relationships with calculated precision—until a single, irreversible mistake shatters his carefully constructed world.

Teddy Wayne’s dark, gripping literary thriller exposes class privilege, desire, and moral decay in a story as psychological as it is explosive.