My Last Innocent Year: A Novel

Written by Daisy Alpert Florin

Narrated by Sarah Bierstock

"The youthful-sounding Sarah Bierstock is an excellent choice to narrate this coming-of-age novel... Bierstock creates a likable character in Isabel, and listeners will want her to find her path--even if takes an affair with a professor to eliminate the bad options."- AudioFile

An incisive, deeply resonant debut novel about a nonconsensual sexual encounter that propels one woman’s final semester at an elite New England college into controversy and chaos—and into an ill-advised affair with a married professor.

It’s 1998 and Isabel Rosen, the only daughter of a Lower East Side appetizing store owner, has one semester left at Wilder College, a prestigious school in New Hampshire. Desperate to shed her working-class roots and still mourning the death of her mother four years earlier, Isabel has always felt like an outsider at Wilder but now, in her final semester, she believes she has found her place—until a nonconsensual sexual encounter with one of the only other Jewish students on campus leaves her reeling.

Enter R. H. Connelly, a once-famous poet and Isabel’s writing professor, a man with secrets of his own. Connelly makes Isabel feel seen, beautiful, talented: the woman she longs to become. His belief in her ignites a belief in herself, and the two begin an affair that shakes the foundation of who Isabel thinks she is, for better and worse. As the lives of the adults around her slowly come apart, Isabel discovers that the line between youth and adulthood is less defined than she thought.

A coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, Daisy Alpert Florin's My Last Innocent Year is a timely and wise portrait of a young woman learning to trust her voice and move toward independence while recognizing the beauty and grit of where she came from.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt & Company.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: Feb 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781250882387

Daisy Alpert Florin

Daisy Alpert Florin attended Dartmouth College and received graduate degrees from Columbia University and Bank Street Graduate School of Education. She is a recipient of the 2016 Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship at Sarah Lawrence College and was a 2019–20 fellow in the BookEnds novel revision fellowship, where she worked with founding director Susan Scarf Merrell. A native New Yorker, Florin lives in Connecticut with her family. My Last Innocent Year is her first novel.

Reviews for My Last Innocent Year

[Dawn Merritt Theisen · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I could not get into thos book. Should have been a dnf.

[Hannah Weeks · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book was incredible, I felt so seen and understood reading this book. It’s going on my favorites shelf next to East of Eden and On Writing. Currently in a post book depression from this book but it was incredible.

[Karen Randall · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Smart all the way through. Very very well written, no stupid spots, no lags, just a very excellently written story.