The author of Pretend I'm Dead (2018) and Vacuum in the Dark (2019) returns with another wonderfully off-kilter protagonist.Beagin loves weirdos-fully and unironically. Her first two novels starred Mona, a woman whose job cleaning houses affords her a fascinating window into her clients' lives and an idiosyncratic education in human behavior. Beagin's new main character is literally paid to eavesdrop on the therapy sessions of strangers. After quitting her job as a pharmacy tech and leaving her fiance, she moves from Los Angeles to Hudson, New York, and starts working as a transcriptionist for a sex therapist named Om. Her job is to listen to recordings and write down what she hears, but she quickly develops a parasocial relationship with Om's clients-not that different from a listener's relationship to a podcaster or, for that matter, Mona's imagined relationship with Terry Gross of "Fresh Air." But Greta's feelings for the client she calls "Big Swiss" are unusually intense, and a chance meeting at the dog park with this well-known stranger-whose real name is Flavia-turns into an affair. This relationship is defined by its intensity and by the ticking time bombs buried within it. Greta gives Flavia a fake name when they meet, and she doesn't tell Flavia that she knows her deepest secrets. Flavia is married, a fact that she doesn't hide but which is, obviously, a complication. And both women are still learning how to deal with the central tragedies of their lives. Flavia endured a horrific assault that she insists is no big deal. Greta has repressed significant details from her mother's suicide. Beagin seems to have a keen understanding of the myriad ways trauma manifests. This not only allows her to build damaged but resilient and fascinating characters, but it might also be why her books are filled with people who do bad-or extremely questionable-things without being bad guys. Beagin gives her characters choices and second chances, and the happiness she offers them begins with themselves.Beagin establishes her place among artfully eccentric writers like Nell Zink, Elif Batuman, and Jennifer Egan.

Beagin (Vacuum in the Dark) delivers a delightfully off-kilter romantic comedy set in a Hudson Valley increasingly transformed by transplants from New York City. The protagonist, Greta, is in her 40s, living in a semi-derelict Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, N.Y., with her beloved dog, Piñón. Greta is working as a transcriptionist for a local sex therapist named Om when she is captivated by the voice of one of Om’s patients, a 30-something married woman whom she nicknames Big Swiss for her height and nationality, who used to live in Brooklyn. At the dog park, Greta and Big Swiss (whose real name is Flavia) meet by chance, and romance between the two blossoms, complicated by the fact that Greta is privy to Big Swiss’s most private inner thoughts. While the interpersonal intrigue is palpable, this is also very much a novel about place, full of alternately snide and affectionate commentary about the rapidly gentrifying town. When encountering another of the therapist’s patients and his wife at a coffee shop, Greta notes, “like most people in Hudson, they were better looking than average and dressed like boutique farmers.” Beagin is a gifted storyteller with a flair for the eccentric and a soft spot for a wayward soul. This unconventional love story has a surplus of appeal from page one. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM Partners. (Feb.)