The Turnout

The Turnout wins the Los Angeles Times Book Award!

A New York Times Bestseller and TODAY Show #ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick

Bestselling and award-winning author Megan Abbott’s revelatory, mesmerizing, and game-changing new novel set against the hothouse of a family-run ballet studio, and an interloper who arrives to bring down the carefully crafted Eden-like facade.

Ballet flows through their veins. Dara and Marie Durant were dancers since birth, with their long necks and matching buns and pink tights, homeschooled and trained by their mother. Decades later the Durant School of Dance is theirs. The two sisters, together with Charlie, Dara’s husband and once their mother’s prize student, inherited the school after their parents died in a tragic accident nearly a dozen years ago. Marie, warm and soft, teaches the younger students; Dara, with her precision, trains the older ones; and Charlie, back broken after years of injuries, rules over the back office. Circling around each other, the three have perfected a dance, six days a week, that keeps the studio thriving. But when a suspicious accident occurs, just at the onset of the school’s annual performance of The Nutcracker, a season of competition, anxiety, and exhilaration, an interloper arrives and threatens the delicate balance of everything they’ve worked for.

Taut and unnerving, The Turnout is Megan Abbott at the height of her game. With uncanny insight and hypnotic writing, it is a sharp and strange dissection of family ties and sexuality, femininity and power, and a tale that is both alarming and irresistible.

One of:

The New York Times’ Most Anticipated Books of the Summer
TIME’s Most Anticipated Books of 2021
Seattle Times’ Most Anticipated
LitHub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2021
CrimeReads’ Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2021
Publishers Weekly’s Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2021: Mystery/Thriller
BookPage’s Most Anticipated Mysteries and Thrillers of 2021
Book Riot’s “Read or Dead” Most anticipated
Goodreads’ Most Anticipated Mysteries and Thrillers of 2021
Booktrib’s Most Anticipated
SheReads Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2021
Entertainment Weekly’s Best New Books to Read in August
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Great New Books to Read this August

What People Are Saying

“Abbott’s novels are often described as crime fiction, and, while indeed she works with mystery and suspense and draws on noir and Gothic tropes, her goal seems less to construct intricate, double-crossing plot problems than to explore the dark side of femininity. Her prose is often incantatory, her dialogue lightly stylized. Frequently her tone has a strong flavor, pungent and fermented. In other words, Megan Abbott is a mood.”
— The New York Times

“Desire and ballet are entwined in a smoldering pas de deux throughout this tightly choreographed thriller.”
— The Washington Post

“Abbott’s prose has never been more impressive than in this whirlpool of psychological suspense, shocking images, well-wrought metaphors—and one final twist that rattles like a serpent’s tail in Eden.”
— The Wall Street Journal

“Abbott’s prose is dazzlingly precise and her portrayal of student rivalries razor-sharp in this taut and psychologically gripping novel.”
— The Guardian

“Abbott is a legend for good reason. No one combines the style of classic noir with the psyches of sophisticated men and women who are willing to do anything — anything — to succeed better than Abbott. Her latest is a dizzyingly fascinating story of a family-owned dance studio and the weight of unrequited ambition. An instant classic.”
— S.A. Cosby, The Washington Post 

“A beautifully accomplished thriller... From the first page to the reveal at the end, a palpable sense of menace and the sympathy we feel for Dara as her world unravels make it impossible to look away.”
— Star Tribune

“This look at the darker side of the dance world demonstrates why Abbott has few peers at crafting moving stories of secrets and broken lives.”
— Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

 “Abbott brilliantly explores the psychosexual undercurrents throbbing throughout this haunting novel, from the dancers’ pointe shoes, ‘pink satin fantasies we beat into submission,’ through even The Nutcracker itself, ‘a young girl’s dream of peering over the precipice into the dark furrow of adulthood.’”
— Booklist (Starred Review)

“Abbott is not only a suspense author at the top of her game, she’s also a scholar, and The Turnout promises to be both homage to classic tropes and visionary model for their evolution.”
— LitHub

“At once engaging and unnerving.”­­
— Reader’s Digest

“There is not a writer alive who is better at investigating the tension and threat of violence at the center of women’s lives than Megan Abbott…. Megan goes into the heart of female spaces and finds the ugly in all that pretty, the dark in all that light, with breath-taking suspense. The Turnout has notes of James M. Cain and Alfred Hitchcock, but it’s better because it’s so fresh and unexpected, so wholly revelatory. I turned page after page, holding my breath in fear, and also excitement, about what might happen in this run-down ballet school, what blood red might be lurking behind all that pink. This is Megan Abbott working at the absolute height of her talent.”
— Attica Locke, author of Bluebird, Bluebird and Heaven, My Home

“All one needs to know about a Megan Abbott book is that it's a Megan Abbott book -- dreamy, sexy, a deep dive into a subculture that has been exhaustively researched. The Turnout is all those things and more, taking you so far into the world of a small ballet school that you feel the characters' aches and pains in your joints, your feet and, most dangerous of all, your heart.”
— Laura Lippman, author of Lady in the Lake

“Abbott has a top-notch ability to reveal the dark undercurrents of women’s relationships and sexuality... This is clever, chilling psychological suspense at its best.”
— Library Journal, starred review

“Abbott takes her breathless reader to some very dark places, but also to beauty.”
— The Seattle Times

“An intriguing crime novel about family, power, and sexuality.”
— AV Club

News

The Turnout is being adapted into a limited series by eOne, with Megan as co-creator and co-showrunner. The series is produced by UCP and Michael Lombardo.