Lindsay MacMillan

Perfect for fans of The Happy Ever After Playlist and The Boyfriend Project, Lindsay Macmillan's debut novel deftly captures the feeling of being adrift in your late twenties. Rae is in a romantic recession. The young investment banker is tired of being single in New York City. Deep into a quarter-life crisis, she's overwhelmed by all the external pressure to rise the corporate and romantic ladders at the same time. Feeling the biological clock ticking, she vows to close the deal on locking in a husband before her 30th birthday. The Manhattan dating scene has as many ups and downs as the stock market and leaves Rae exhausted from late nights formatting spreadsheets at the office followed by even later nights reciting her resume to strangers at over-crowded bars. She considers throwing in the towel, but her friends come to the rescue, continually boosting her up with ice cream and cheap wine that they share in their sixth-floor walk-up. Rae soldiers on until she meets Dustin, a poetic soul trapped in a business suit, just like her. Rae starts to hear the wedding bells but no amount of financial modeling can project what their future will look like. Will Rae learn how to free herself from the idea she had in her head of what thirty was supposed to look like? Can she reject society's narrow definitions of what success means in love and life and know when it's time to walk away? Or is she too conditioned to choose the "right path" to follow her unpaved intuition? Moving, funny, and timely, The Heart of the Deal is the story of one woman's reckoning with life in a city, an industry, and a relationship whose high highs (nearly) make up for the low lows.

A Novel

The Heart of the Deal

Elli Barnette

Maybe love was always cliché, and anything too original just meant you were overcomplicating some knockoff to convince yourself it was true.

I'd rather be haunted by failure than by not knowing if I would've failed.

The Heart of the Deal quotes

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