"We're taking a position that celebrates the transience of the flower. Not that we don't prolong the bloom as long as we can, but we recognize that a flower's impermanence is part of its beauty."

A sweeping tale of love and deception, wealth and beauty, obligation and desire, The White Rose is as seductive a story as the flower for which it's named.

Marian Kahn, a forty-eight-year-old professor of history at Columbia University, is in the midst of an affair with a man twenty-two years her junior. Although Oliver's wish for commitment is genuine, Marian knows the day will come when they must part ways. She will never leave her marriage, no matter how passionately she feels for Oliver, and she doubts his own devotion can last.

Then Oliver commits a spontaneous and seemingly harmless act, setting in motion a series of unforeseeable events that lead him to Sophie Klein. A graduate student in history and an idiosyncratic heiress, Sophie is engaged to Marian's pompous cousin, Bart. Oliver's deception eventually builds to a startling confrontation, bringing harsh truths to light and forcing Marian, Oliver, and Sophie to each evaluate what they're seeking from life --- and to learn that love, like even the most beautiful of blooms, is often transient.

With The White Rose, which was inspired by Richard Strauss's opera Der Rosenkavalier, Jean Hanff Korelitz has crafted both a thought-provoking treatise on social mores and a compelling page-turner.