Good Intentions - by Jessy Wu (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In this debut campus-novel-turned-corporate-thriller from a blistering new voice in Australian fiction, two young star-crossed reporters navigating the worlds of journalism and finance find themselves on opposite sides of a career-defining clash.

In the cramped basement office of their university newspaper, Jake and Nadia learn to see the world, cutting their teeth on a story that exposes a decade of institutional corruption. In the quiet hours, they also find each other. Then Nadia leaves.

A decade later, Nadia returns to Sydney as a corporate powerhouse, wearing her competence like armor. In the meantime, Jake has forged a reputation as a crusading journalist whose bylines have brought down careers and companies. Their worlds collide when they're each pulled into the orbit of Marjorie Ford, a biotech visionary whose meteoric rise becomes Nadia's chance at a big break--and the center of Jake's latest muckraking investigation. As battlelines are drawn and old wounds flare, both must decide how far they're prepared to go and what they're willing to sacrifice to come out on top.

For fans of Sally Rooney and Rachel Khong, Good Intentions asks what it takes to stay true in a world that demands compromise, and what happens when the person who once saw you most clearly becomes the one who threatens to topple everything you've built.

Review Quotes

"A crisp, confident debut that examines what becomes of our morals when they come up against the friction of real life--and how, as adults, we face the people who knew and loved us in our youth. Good Intentions is a knockout." - Grace D. Li, bestselling author of Portrait of a Thief

"For a first-time novelist, Jessy Wu has knocked Good Intentions out of the park. Expertly balancing a taut campus romance with a blistering story of capitalistic greed and moral compromises, Wu has crafted a novel that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts--a page-turner filled with viscerally real characters, who ask us what it means to love, fight, and believe at the end of the world." - Grant Ginder, bestselling author of So Old, So Young