The Professional Apology Drafter
A Novel

About this book:

Arthur Vance is the ghostwriter the powerful call when catastrophe strikes—a specialist in the syntax of survival who can spin a senator's bribe into a "lapse in judgment" or a CEO's bigotry into a "philosophical disagreement." For fourteen years, he has built a lucrative, invisible career crafting statements that protect reputations and stock prices, wielding the passive voice like a scalpel and the conditional tense like a shield. His rules are absolute: never repeat the slur, never explain the context, and always, always give the public the spectacle of your suffering so they'll let you keep your fortune.

Then his estranged daughter sends him a letter addressed *To Whom It May Concern*—the coldest salutation in his own arsenal—announcing she's leaving New York forever and burning every carefully drafted apology he's mailed her since her mother's death. The woman who taught him that language could fix anything is the one person whose forgiveness he cannot draft. As a new client's scandal spirals toward an international incident, Arthur finds his professional detachment cracking, forced to confront the terrible gap between a sentence that sounds like truth and a sentence that *is* true.

Sharp, darkly comic, and quietly devastating, *The Professional Apology Drafter* is a novel about the stories we sell to survive—and the one story no amount of revision can repair.