“This is relationships plus mess… the perfect book for summer.” -- MJ Franklin, New York Times
Description
Cat St. Clair is ready for her messy love triangle era now that she’s in an open relationship. But she didn’t foresee a forbidden love triangle with the only two people who are off-limits: her boyfriend’s best friend and his girlfriend. Being a twenty-something writer who lives for plot, she falls for them anyway, with deliciously disastrous consequences, in this electric literary debut for fans of Xochitl Gonzalez, Coco Mellors, Lily King, and Raven Leilani.
It’s the fall of 2024, and twenty-four-year-old Cat isn’t asking for too much: all she wants is three boyfriends, to write her little novels, and to survive another chaotic presidential election. She’s in an open relationship with her college sweetheart Jay, but nonmonogamy isn’t just a hot trend she’s trying. It’s her sliver of freedom in a world eager to wrestle it from her for being a Black woman going after what she wants with reckless abandon.
While political tensions roil the campus where Cat is slowly earning her creative writing degree, she finds herself drawn to Jay’s best friend, Tristan, who’s smart, super hot, and…in a monogamous relationship. And then she meets Tristan’s girlfriend, Nia, a captivating art student with her own gravitational pull.
Friends and family urge her to just be happy with Jay, but Cat is determined to have it all—or blow up her life trying. As she falls for all the wrong people, racking up lies, betrayals, and terrible drafts of her novel, she tries to write her way to a happy ending. But in art, politics, and love, true liberation may take more than rewriting the old scripts. It may mean inventing something entirely new.
Reviews
"Blassingame’s novel is pure joy. She brings the hijinks of a messy triangle that we all know and love to life, and twists expectations to hilarious results. So often, funny doesn’t land on the page. Blassingame understands comedy." --Debutiful
“Romantic chaos reigns in Blassingame’s snappy debut novel. Cat is a D.C.-based M.F.A. student who is in an open relationship with her boyfriend, Jay. Jay’s best friend, Tristan, hates Cat, but neither Tristan nor Cat can deny the spark between them. That’s made more complicated because Tristan already has a girlfriend … whom Cat also feels a connection with. Did we mention chaos?” -- The New York Times
“The slow-burn love square in They All Fall in Love at the End crackles into a roaring, uncontrollable fire as four characters face the question of how to thrive in the bleak landscape of contemporary dating… an achievement.” -- BookPage