You Were Made for This

DOTING WIFE, DEVOTED HUSBAND, CHERISHED CHILD.

Merry, Sam, and Conor are the perfect family in the perfect place. Merry adores the domestic life: baking pies, gardening, caring for her infant son. Sam, formerly an academic, is pursuing a new career as a filmmaker. Sometimes they can hardly believe how lucky they are. What perfect new lives they’ve built.

When Merry’s childhood friend Frank visits their Swedish paradise, she immediately becomes part of the family. She bonds with Conor. And with Sam. She befriends the neighbors and even finds herself embracing the domesticity she’s always seemed to scorn.

All their lives, Frank and Merry have been more like sisters than best friends. And that’s why Frank soon sees the things others might miss. Treacherous things, which are almost impossible to believe when looking at this perfect family. But Frank, of all people, knows that the truth is rarely what you want the world to see.

You Were Made for This is a gripping page-turner as well as a provocative exploration of the darker sides of friendship, marriage, and motherhood.

“Sacks’s first novel expertly portrays the dark side of domesticity and motherhood... Fans of dark and twisted psychological thrillers will be swept up in the appearance of domestic bliss and maternal perfection, only to be left off-kilter and breathless with each costume change.”
― Library Journal

“Though Sacks...doesn't give readers anyone to root for, her unblinking look at beautiful people with ugly secrets has the voyeuristic fascination of a Bergman film.”
― Publishers Weekly

"A sinister, razor's edge of a book. I was, in turn, totally gripped, completely unsettled, and not just a little freaked out by these brutal characters and the damage they did to themselves and each other. Whatever you feel while reading this dark, twisting story, you definitely won't be able to put it down."
― Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author of The Red Hunter

"Set in an idyllic Swedish forest straight out of a fairy tale, You Were Made for This is a taut novel of deception, full of heart-wrenching twists and turns. Michelle Sacks shows us that happy families are not always what they seem and explores the dark shadows that lurk within the fairy tale, and in human nature, in this richly compelling debut."
― Jennifer McMahon, New York Times bestselling author of The Winter People

"An insightful and skillfully constructed novel, with three alternating narrators, this will keep readers rapt to the final page."
― Library Journal

"You Were Made for This deftly explores the darkest corners of domestic life through the eyes of three complicated, damaged souls, inextricably connected by obsession, loyalty, jealousy, and unspeakable secrets. The savage beauty of Michelle Sacks's prose nestled within the most chilling of stories will leave you shaken and bereft. It is a stunning accomplishment."
― Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Weight of Silence

"You Were Made for This plumbs the darkness that can lie at the core of the most intimate of relationships: between husband and wife, lifelong friends, even mother and child. Michelle Sacks has a gift for empathy, and her broken sinners are so tenderly drawn that even at their worst they remain heartbreakingly human. She's also written the most complex and relatable female friendship I've read in years."
― Heather Young, The Strand Critics' Award winner for The Lost Girls

"You Were Made for This is a thrilling literary fairytale from which you can't escape, not even after you've found your way back to the light of day. The warning is right there in the novel's epigraph: 'You must always go carefully into the dark Swedish woods.' And then in you go, forgetting to leave bread crumbs behind you, until soon you are lost in Sacks' fascinating domestic dreamscape, a dark and deceptive place where old wounds, secrets, and the seeds of violence are cooked up and jarred and stowed in plain sight, yet fill your heart with dread at every turn."
― Tim Johnston, New York Times bestselling author of Descent

"Sacks' writing is at once lush in description but also spare; she uses the white space around the words to nurture a sense of dread. Hard to read but also bewitchingly hard to put down—a fitting contradiction in a novel that explores the corruption at the heart of beauty."
― Kirkus

"An insightful and skillfully constructed novel, with three alternating narrators, this will keep readers rapt to the final page."
― Booklist