Read by Sarah Bierstock

"The youthful-sounding Sarah Bierstock is an excellent choice to narrate this coming-of-age novel... Bierstock creates a likable character in Isabel, and listeners will want her to find her path--even if takes an affair with a professor to eliminate the bad options."- AudioFile An incisive, deeply resonant debut novel about a nonconsensual sexual encounter that propels one woman's final semester at an elite New England college into controversy and chaos-and into an ill-advised affair with a married professor. It's 1998 and Isabel Rosen, the only daughter of a Lower East Side appetizing store owner, has one semester left at Wilder College, a prestigious school in New Hampshire. Desperate to shed her working-class roots and still mourning the death of her mother four years earlier, Isabel has always felt like an outsider at Wilder but now, in her final semester, she believes she has found her place-until a nonconsensual sexual encounter with one of the only other Jewish students on campus leaves her reeling. Enter R. H. Connelly, a once-famous poet and Isabel's writing professor, a man with secrets of his own. Connelly makes Isabel feel seen, beautiful, talented: the woman she longs to become. His belief in her ignites a belief in herself, and the two begin an affair that shakes the foundation of who Isabel thinks she is, for better and worse. As the lives of the adults around her slowly come apart, Isabel discovers that the line between youth and adulthood is less defined than she thought. A coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, Daisy Alpert Florin's My Last Innocent Year is a timely and wise portrait of a young woman learning to trust her voice and move toward independence while recognizing the beauty and grit of where she came from. A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt & Company. Daisy Alpert Florin attended Dartmouth College and received graduate degrees from Columbia University and Bank Street Graduate School of Education. She is a recipient of the 2016 Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship at Sarah Lawrence College and was a 2019-20 fellow in the BookEnds novel revision fellowship, where she worked with founding director Susan Scarf Merrell. A native New Yorker, Daisy lives in Connecticut with her family. My Last Innocent Year is her first novel. Named a "Most Anticipated Book of 2023" by Zibby Owens Named a "Must-Read Book of Winter" by Town & Country "A deeply timely and relevant campus novel." -Town & Country "Readers will be rapt and pierced by a young woman's uphill battle, even in all her brilliance, to believe that she can be the ultimate witness to her own life." -Booklist "A brilliantly crafted campus novel for the generation before #MeToo...Florin's prose is gorgeous and enthralling, and her imagistic portrayal of New England campus life-from divey college town bars to Winter Carnival to English department parties to skinny-dipping in the river-is pitch-perfect. She also succeeds where many stories of dubious sexual consent fail: She avoids heavy-handed moralizing in favor of ambiguity, however uncomfortable...Florin's debut is not to be missed." -Kirkus "Immersive...Florin does great work exploring the era's murky sexual politics." -Publishers Weekly "My Last Innocent Year possesses an urgent timeliness-in its examination of gender, power, and class on a college campus-but Daisy Alpert Florin's remarkable debut is, at heart, an intimate, intricately constructed coming of age tale to rival the greats of the genre, from The Great Gatsby to Catcher in the Rye. Remarkable, unputdownable, brilliant." -Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year "Gripping, nuanced, and thought-provoking, My Last Innocent Year is an intimate portrait of a woman on the cusp of adulthood grappling with the thorniest of issues: agency and consent, ambition and jealousy, loyalty and betraya

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