Fair Warning Hardback - 2002

Robert Olen Butler is one of our most versatile and dynamic contemporary fiction writers -- a narrative master who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993 for his classic short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. His new novel -- based on a short story that won the National Magazine Award for fiction as part of Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story -- offers an unforgettable glimpse into the rich and privileged world of Manhattan's auction houses. Ambitious, winsome, and ceaselessly charismatic, Amy Dickerson is the star employee of Nichols and Gray, an auction house catering to the shopping pheromones of the rich and powerful. Her customers are intoxicated with love for the objects that define them and thrilled by the act of making them their own. And sometimes, such as when a mysterious man locks eyes with her as she gives "fair warning" before sounding the auction gavel, that object is Amy herself. After years of fighting a smothering mother, a suburbanite sister whom she struggles to respect, a late father who never forgave her for abandoning the family business, and the ghosts of doomed relationships, Amy thinks she has finally found love in the form of Alain Bouchard, a suave and sophisticated French business mogul who aims to be Amy's new boss. It all seems perfect, until unsettling signs begin to appear. Is Alain so different from Amy's alienated clients -- connoisseurs who lose touch with the very things they pursue? Fair Warning is a sweeping, fast-moving, and alluringly intimate meditation on the possibility of love in a world where everyone must own or be owned. "Robert Olen Butler may be our pre-eminent practitioner of first-personnarrative.... The result [is] original, funny, bizarrely haunting." -- Wilton Bernhardt, Chicago Tribune