Excerpt from Wellness by Nathan Hill, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He's an artist—that much is clear, for he can most often be found mixing paints and solvents, inks and dyes, plucking photo papers out of chemical baths or leaning over a light box inspecting film negatives through a small round magnifier. She's amazed at how long he can look. He'll spend an hour comparing just two frames, staring at one, then the other, and then the first again, searching for the more perfect image. And when he's found it, he circles the frame with a red grease pencil, every other negative is x-ed out, and she applauds his decisiveness: when he chooses a picture, or a tattoo, or a certain bohemian lifestyle, he chooses devotedly. It is a quality that she—who cannot decide on even the simplest things: what to wear, what to study, where to live, whom to love, what to do with he life—both envies and covets. This boy has a mind calmed by high purpose; she feels like a bean jumping against its pod.

He's exactly the kind of person—defiant, passionate—that she came to this remote city to find. The obvious flaw in the plan, she realizes now, is that a man so defiant and passionate would never be interested in a girl as conventional, as conformist, as dull and bourgeois as her.

Thus, they do not speak, and the winter nights pass slowly, glacially, the ice coating tree branches like barnacles. All season it's the same: when his light is off, he is watching her; when her light is off, she is watching him. And on the nights she isn't home, he sits there feeling dejected, desperate, maybe even a little pathetic, and he gazes upon her window and feels like time is zipping away, opportunities gone, feels like he is losing a race with the life he wishes he could lead. And on the nights he isn't home, she sits there feeling forsaken, feeling once again so bluntly dented by the world, and she examines his window like it's an aquarium, hoping to see some wonderful thing erupt from the gloom.

And so here they are, lingering in the shadows. Outside, the snow falls plump and quiet. Inside, they are alone in their separate little studios, in their crumbling old buildings. Both their lights are off. They both watch for the other's return. They sit near their windows and wait. They stare across the alley, into dark apartments, and they don't know it, but they're staring at each other.

Excerpted from WELLNESS by Nathan Hill. Copyright © 2023 by Nathan Hill. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.