Tara Isabella Burton

An “enchanting” (Caroline Kepnes, author of You) “fairy-tale-inflected thriller” (The New Yorker) about two sisters who encounter a captivating yet possibly dangerous underworld cult that challenges their perception of reality. A New Yorker Best Book of 2024 Here in Avalon tells the story of two sisters, Rose and Cecilia, whose lives are as different as night and day. Raised—and often...

The Secret History meets The Price of Salt (Vogue) in this “equal parts dangerous and delicious” (Entertainment Weekly) novel about queer desire, religious zealotry, and the hunger for transcendence among the members of a cultic chapel choir at a Maine boarding school—and the ambitious, terrifyingly charismatic girl that rules over them. When shy, sensitive Laura Stearns arrives at St. Dunstan’s...

In Strange Rites, Tara Isabella Burton takes a tour through contemporary American religiosity. As the once dominant totems of civic connection and civil discourse—traditional churches—continue to sink into obsolescence, people are looking elsewhere for the intensity and unity that religion once provided. We're making our own personal faiths—theistic or not—mixing and matching our spiritual, ritualistic, personal, and political practices in...