The Futures - Hardcover

"An emotional page-turner."
--Cosmopolitan


"[A] debut novel written by and for the literary millennial ... Pitoniak maintains her keen eye for the universal insecurities facing her generation today, from romantic uncertainties and the relative benefits and downsides of hedge fund and nonprofit jobs to the emotional effort it requires to negotiate the predetermined facts of one's upbringing with the person one chooses to become."--Harper's Bazaar, "13 Books You Need to Read in January"


"Wall Street meets Girls."
--Elle Canada


"Pitoniak's debut focuses on that time of life that is at turns both exhilarating and terrifying: right after getting out of college, when you're forced to confront who you are and who you want to be, when you know life is just beginning, but you're also starting to feel like many of your options are fading away."--Nylon, "Best New Books of 2017"


"Pitoniak's inspired debut centers on two recent college grads who move to New York City together during the 2008 recession and watch their relationship change drastically."--InStyle

"The Futures takes place on the cusp of the 2008 market crash, and so perfectly encapsulates that time of life when everything was just beginning, when you had no idea who you were or where you were going."--Popsugar

"Pitoniak's assured debut explores the cost of realizing-and misinterpreting-one's dreams ... Navigating terrain-love and youth, college and city life-that's often oversimplified, Pitoniak eschews cliche for nuanced characterization and sharply observed detail. Evan and Julia ring true as 20-somethings, but Pitoniak's novel also speaks to anyone who has searched among possible futures for the way back to what Julia calls 'the person I had been all along.'"--Publishers Weekly


"The Futures transports us to that post-college moment when it seems like you have all the options in the world but no clue about which ones to choose. Pitoniak weaves an unflinchingly honest tale of two people trying to navigate expectations and learning to live with their own mistakes. A compelling and memorable debut."--J. Courtney Sullivan, New York Times bestselling author of The Engagements


"Anna Pitoniak perfectly captures the confusion and heartbreak of those post-college years, when even the strongest among us falter in the face of our own desires. The Futures reminded me of Brightness Falls, Jay McInerney's great novel of New York, for Pitoniak, like McInerney, possesses an instinctual understanding of the mechanisms that make the city run and a knack for embracing her characters' thornier sides. Utterly enjoyable."--Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year


"Pitoniak keeps the pace moving at a steady clip ... Pitoniak's well-plotted, character-driven, interior-focused novel captures the knowable angst of the unknowable possibilities of modern young adulthood."--Booklist

ONE OF REFINERY29's BEST BOOKS OF 2017
ONE OF the Skimm's BEST BOOKS OF 2017

"The next great New York novel."-Town & Country

"A story that feels familiar yet wholly original, like every heartbreak ever."-Marie Claire

"Pitoniak's precise and incisive powers of observation give us a book with startling grace notes ... As in earlier, seminal novels about similar 20-something cohorts-among them Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar-the city is another mirror character, a puzzle the protagonists must solve as they come to grips with their own lives.--NPR.org

In this dazzling debut novel about love and betrayal, a young couple moves to New York City in search of success-only to learn that the lives they dream of may come with dangerous strings attached.

Julia and Evan fall in love as undergraduates at Yale. For Evan, a scholarship student from a rural Canadian town, Yale is a whole new world, and Julia--blond, beautiful, and rich--fits perfectly into the future he's envisioned for himself. After graduation, and on the eve of the great financial meltdown of 2008, they move together to New York City, where Evan lands a job at a hedge fund. But Julia, whose privileged upbringing grants her an easy but wholly unsatisfying job with a nonprofit, feels increasingly shut out of Evan's secretive world.

With the market crashing and banks failing, Evan becomes involved in a high-stakes deal at work--a deal that, despite the assurances of his Machiavellian boss, begins to seem more than slightly suspicious. Meanwhile, Julia reconnects with someone from her past who offers a glimpse of a different kind of live. As the economy craters, and as Evan and Julia spin into their separate orbits, they each find that they are capable of much more--good and bad--than they'd ever imagined.

Rich in suspense and insight, Anna Pitoniak's gripping debut reveals the fragile yet enduring nature of our connections: to one another and to ourselves. THE FUTURES is a glittering story of a couple coming of age, and a searing portrait of what it's like to be young and full of hope in New York City, a place that so often seems determined to break us down--but ultimately may be the very thing that saves us.