Novels
- Eclipse (1977)
- Zoe (1983)
- Fierce People (2002)
- Pharmakon (2008)
- The Stone Girl (2020)
Non fiction
- The Social Climber’s Bible (2014)
Novels Book Covers
Non fiction Book Covers
Dirk Wittenborn Books Overview
Fierce People
A modern coming of age novel about a boy’s struggle for survival in a lush and corrupting world that each day grows more seductive and more lethal. New York’s Lower East Side, 1978. Fifteen year old Finn Earl’s mother, Liz, is a thirty two year old masseuse with a taste for cocaine. When Liz’s habit reaches its breaking point, she seeks sanctuary with one of her clients, aging billionaire Ogden C. Osborne. Less than twenty four hours later, she and Finn have been dropped into a world more savage than anything in National Geographic, more cutthroat than anything New York’s grimy downtown streets have to offer the exclusive rural community of Vlyvalle, New Jersey. In this golden playground for the super rich, they find a new life and new friends amongst the decadent and beautiful denizens of Osborne’s empire. Finn falls in love and grows up fast. He’s living a twisted approximation of the American dream and for a moment everything he wants is there for the taking. But in Vlyvalle, social climbing is a blood sport. Even on what should be the happiest night of Finn’s life on an island in the middle of Osborne’s private lake, naked and high with Osborne’s bewitching granddaughter Maya someone is watching him from the depths of the forest…
and laughing. Soon, Finn is tangled in a web of secrets and betrayals so bizarre and so dangerous that getting out starts to look even harder than getting in.
Pharmakon
An epic novel about family secrets and the consequences of ambition William Friedrich, an ambitious professor of psychology at Yale in 1952, has stumbled upon a drug that promises happiness and that can make him a famous man. When his experiment goes awry, and a research subject commits murder, the consequences will haunt him and his family forever. Pharmakon is an epic novel, an invocation of the quest for bliss, for love, for family, and all of the betrayals that follow. We follow the Friedrichs from the well ordered suburban life of postwar America through the chaos and freedom of the counterculture, into the drug fueled, media crazed eighties and beyond. In William Friedrich, Wittenborn has defined the archetypal American patriarch: a miracle worker and source of strength to everyone except those he loves the most. Pharmakon is also a layered, thoughtful search behind the veil of psychopharmacology as we know it today a tale not only of the consequences of research, but also of the complex personalities, appetites, and struggles that created it. Honest, insightful, and ruefully funny, Pharmakon captures formative moments of the twentieth century, the quirks of an American family, and will enthrall fans of the novels of John Irving.
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