“’We have to stop putting all this pressure on ourselves. It’ll work out eventually.’
“I am so goddamn sick of everyone telling me that.”
So –
As Marisa Kashino’s Best Offer Wins begins, here’s where we are:
Thirty-seven-year-old Margo Miyake and her husband, Ian, have been house-hunting in the Washington, DC, suburbs for eighteen months now. The tiny, cramped apartment they’re living in was supposed to be only temporary, but they’ve lost eleven bidding wars, their plans to have a baby have been put on hold, their marriage has gotten squabbly, and her boss has started dropping pointed comments about Margo getting distracted at work.
The house. If only they can land the house, Margo knows everything will be all right. And then she gets a call from her real-estate agent about a perfect house in a perfect neighborhood, and she hears the perfect ten words: “No one else knows about it! It’s not listed yet.”
And if Margo has anything to do with it, it never will be. How far will she be willing to go? Oh, you have no idea….
Surveillance, reconnoitering? Anyone would do that! Stalking? Come on, it’s just getting to know the owners. Blackmail? Well, you need an edge, don’t you? Everybody else has an edge. What don’t you get about that?
And that’s when things start to get really crazy….
Dark, bitingly funny, compulsively readable, Best Offer Wins is a shocking and shockingly entertaining look at class, race, ambition, obsession, the indignities visited upon us every day, and the lengths to which we will go to get what we think we deserve.
How far would you go?
Maybe you just don’t know yet.
After seventeen years as a journalist, Marisa Kashino knows quite a bit about her subject. Her time at Washingtonian magazine partly included overseeing real estate and home design coverage, and her time at the Washington Post involved a section devoted to the home.
“I couldn’t even begin to quantify how much of it made it into the book. Safe to say, a lot! I can give you one specific example —at the Post, I was mostly an editor, but one of the few stories I wrote there myself was about couples who split up because of stressful home renovations. I happened to be working on that piece at the same time I was beginning the first draft of Best Offer Wins. So much of what I learned from reporting it had to do with the emotional and psychological baggage that we each bring to homeownership and the concept of a ‘dream home.’ I absolutely drew on some of that material when I was crafting Margo and her husband Ian’s contrasting backstories, and the ways in which their different upbringings could create tension.
“The whole idea for the book definitely stems from the years I spent covering real estate as a reporter, including during the particularly deranged housing market triggered by Covid. I heard a lot of wild stories about desperate buyers, and mobbed open houses, and listings getting 60 or 70 offers. As a millennial, the housing crisis already felt like a defining problem for my generation, but this was the moment when it boiled over to an obscene degree.
“Fast forward a couple years—I was thinking of writing a thriller, and an uber-competitive house hunt seemed like the perfect context for one. I remember walking into the kitchen one morning, and saying to my husband:.
What if a buyer was so desperate, she did X? (no spoilers!). So, once I had that idea for the big twist that comes late in the novel, it was just a matter of plotting my way to that point.”
To read more of Neil’s review and discussion with Marisa Kashino, go here.
