A Flaw in the Design: Writing the Literary Thriller with Nathan Oates

ABOUT A FLAW IN THE DESIGN

A professor’s life is turned upside down when he takes in his charming, wildly dangerous nephew, whose wealthy parents have just died under mysterious circumstances, in this propulsive, edge-of-your-seat debut psychological thriller.

“An absolute page-turner . . . I read it in a single sitting.”—Miranda Cowley Heller, bestselling author of The Paper Palace
 
The cleverest psychopaths hide in plain sight.

Nathan Oates’s debut novel, A Flaw in the Design, is published by Random House. The Guardian calls it a “psychological thriller par excellence.” The novel is published by Serpent’s Tail in the UK, and numerous translations are forthcoming. His collection of short stories, The Empty House, won the Spokane Prize. His stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best American Mystery Stories, Forty Stories, and elsewhere. He has been awarded fellowships from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Missouri, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and elsewhere. He is a professor at Seton Hall University, where he teaches creative writing. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his family.