“Sequels can be very enticing when the initial book has done well,” says a literary agent early on in Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Sequel. The novel’s antiheroine, Anna Williams-Bonner, replies with characteristic pragmatism: “But they’re never as good as the first book, are they?” There follows a long pause as each of them tries and fails to find an example of a successful sequel; it’s typical of Korelitz’s wry humour that the only one they can name is the ultimate disaster follow-up – that of Harper Lee.
The Sequel is the sequel to Korelitz’s hit literary thriller The Plot, which concerned a failing writer, Jacob Finch Bonner, who stole the plot of one of his students’ works in progress and spun it into a bestseller, only to find himself the target of anonymous online attacks from someone who appears to know about his crime. The Sequel tells the story of his wife, Anna, now a writer herself and the recipient of similar threats of exposure. Since Anna has plenty of secrets she would prefer to keep buried, she grows increasingly determined to discover her persecutor and silence them.
