A Lit Hub Favorite Book of the Year

"As our narrator loses his grip on reality, Davis drops her readers into successive scenes so fluidly that even we forget what just happened. I raced through the book, marveling at its precise, restrained prose and grasping paranoiacally at small details that might indicate what was real and what wasn't. What does become clear by the end, though, are the dangers of dwelling on past miseries, which so thoroughly haunt the novel." --Chelsea Leu, The New York Times Book Review

"Bizarre, arresting . . . Menace gathers. So does a marvelously calibrated pace and tension. As with some of our best haunted fiction (The Turn of the Screw, The Haunting of Hill House), the story obeys an internal, quasi-demonic logic . . . Scapegoat manages to interleave tokens of wry wisdom--about American culture, academic and social life, marriage, dailiness." --Joan Frank, The Washington Post

"Riveting . . . Davis' vividly wrought setting is more than backdrop. It fuels one of the novel's big questions: What is our responsibility to the past? . . . Within her haunting landscape and propulsive plot, [Davis] manages to introduce some morbid humor . . . Davis emerges as a legitimately skillful novelist unafraid to ask difficult questions." --L.A. Taggart, San Francisco Chronicle

"Slim, fast-paced, and elliptical . . . Lynchian in that there's a foreboding since of dread running through everything, even the most banal interactions, yet it's also full of humor . . . I laughed out loud several times while reading this." --Lincoln Michel, Counter Craft

"To call the final act of The Scapegoat unpredictable would be a massive understatement; Davis wraps things up on her own terms, expectations be damned. That's part of what makes The Scapegoat such a thrilling, audacious book . . . [N's narration] suffuses the novel with a suffocating terror that escalates as the book draws to a close . . . [Davis] is a truly talented author." --Michael Schaub, Alta

"An eerie, captivating narrative that twists like a dream and will haunt like a nightmare . . . This dreamlike version of a murder mystery deserves the comparisons to David Lynch . . . If you're looking to get swept away in an eerie, dreamy mystery, The Scapegoat is for you." --Debbie Clark, The Post and Courier

"A wild, beguiling tale . . . Like Pynchon, Davis is unafraid to be playful, skewering postmodern conventions even as she celebrates them." --David James Poissant, New York Journal of Books

"I'm always pleased to recommend a debut, and even more so when it's as sharp as Davis's. For some reason, this book feels French--it has the claustrophobic tautness of The Perfect Nanny. It also has the compression of Jean-Paul Manchette: the novel takes place over the course of a fortnight, and we are in the mind of a man who is losing his grip on reality." --Lisa Levy, Crime Reads

"Unnervingly good . . . An eerie and surprising reconstruction by an unreliable narrator." --Kirkus (starred review)

"Sara Davis's The Scapegoat is ingenious, suspenseful, wise, sad, sometimes very frightening, and often very funny, too. The novel gets at the terrifyingly convincing lies (or stories) that we tell ourselves, inevitably about that which we most need to know. The Scapegoat made me fall in love again with the form of the novel!" --Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors

"The Scapegoat is a brilliant, mysterious book that challenges every tired idea of what a novel should be. Fast, funny, and deeply disturbing, it reads as though it's been beamed in from some alternate universe, one where the rules of time and space operate just differently enough to create an entirely new kind of storytelling. Sara Davis is some kind of sorcerer. I'll be haunted by this book for a long time to come." --Andrew Martin, author of Cool for America

"Sara Davis's The Scapegoat is a mystery novel in the way Paul Auster's New York Trilogy or Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle are mystery novels: it's an investigation of life, of thinking, of investigation itself. It's impossible to anticipate, and very, very hard to put down." --Paul LaFarge, author of The Night Ocean

"The Scapegoat is a delight--like a David Lynch movie, a Swedish detective novel, and The Shining combined, with not just an unreliable narrator but an unforgettable one. Sara Davis captures campus life and the ruthlessness of academia in a novel that is at once a chilling murder mystery, a witty academic noir, and a poignant exploration of an illegitimate son's quest for parental recognition and love." --Rebecca Curtis, author of Twenty Grand and Other Tales of Love & Money