Austin Wright Selected Works

A fifty-year-old college professor's quiet life is disturbed by a series of mysterious phone calls full of odd details form his childhood that no one could possibly know; the caller has penetrated his deepest secret: a childhood game of imagination that became such a stimulant that Morley could literally not think without it. In the process of reliving his life and its old mythology, Morley comes into possession of a new one.

Fifteen years ago, Susan Morrow left her first husband Edward Sheffield, an unpublished writer. Now, she's enduring middle class suburbia as a doctor's wife, when out of the blue she receives a package containing the manuscript of her ex-husband's first novel. He writes asking her to read the book; she was always his best critic, he says. As Susan reads, she is drawn into the fictional life of Tony Hastings, a math professor driving his family to their summer house in Maine. And as we read with her, we too become lost in Sheffield's thriller. As the Hastings' ordinary, civilized lives are disastrously, violently sent off course, Susan is plunged back into the past, forced to confront the darkness that inhabits her, and driven to name the fear that gnaws at her future and will change her life. Wright's novel formed the basis of the 2016 Tom Ford film, Nocturnal Animals.

Peter Gregory, a 35-year-old high school English teacher with an ex-wife and kids, tries to drown himself in the Ohio River. Failing to manage even that, he decides to hitch a ride east, fleeing the state and escaping accusations of rape and murder. As he assumes and discards aliases along the way, he believes that he can begin again, a fresh start - but the past has a habit of catching up with all of us, no matter how fast we run.

Wright's first novel, about the sexual problems afflicting an American marriage.