Not since Donna Tartt's The Secret History has a novel this intoxicating captured the headiness and dark temptations of university life. The old Etruscan city of Grifonia swarms with year-abroad students—thousands of them from all over. Ostensibly, they've come to study. But really they are here to reinvent themselves, to shuck their identities and buck constraints far from the watchful eyes of parents and others who know them too well. There's a reason Henry James's young ladies went to Europe with chaperones. Today's young ladies don't. In Abroad, the bestselling novelist Katie Crouch—whose Girls in Trucks brilliantly portrayed the cruelties of postcollege New York life on a Southern girl trying to make her way—tears a story from international headlines and transforms it into a page-turning parable of modern girlhood, full of longing and reckless behavior. As the heroine (and the reader) of Abroad will soon discover, Grifonia is a...

"A wickedly irresistible novel."– Natalie Baszile, author of Queen SugarTwo women abroad search for the truth about their husbands—and their country.Meet Persephone Wilder, a displaced genius posing as the wife of an American diplomat in Namibia. Persephone takes her job as a representative of her country seriously, coming up with an intricate set of rules to survive the problems she encounters: how to dress in hundred-degree weather without showing too much skin, how not to look drunk at embassy functions, and how to eat roasted oryx with grace. She also suspects her husband is not actually the ambassador's legal counsel, but a secret agent in the CIA. The consummate embassy wife, she takes the newest trailing spouse, Amanda Evans, under her wing.Amanda arrives in Namibia mere weeks after giving up her Silicon Valley job so her husband, Mark, could have his family close as he works on his Fulbright project. But once they're settled in...