Celadon Books
Best Offer Wins: A GMA Book Club Pick
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A Good Morning America Book Club Pick * A Good Housekeeping Book Club Pick * An ELLE Best Mystery/Thriller of 2025 * A BookRiot Best Mystery/Thriller of 2025
"It starts out feeling pretty light and fun, but I promise you, you have no idea where this story is going." -Taylor Jenkins Reid, recommended for her Must-Read Book of 2025 in TIME Magazine
An insanely competitive housing market. A desperate buyer on the edge. In Marisa Kashino's darkly humorous debut novel, Best Offer Wins, the white picket fence becomes the ultimate symbol of success--and obsession. How far would you go for the house of your dreams?
Eighteen months and 11 lost bidding wars into house-hunting in the overheated Washington, DC suburbs, 37-year-old publicist Margo Miyake gets a tip about the perfect house, in the perfect neighborhood, slated to come up for sale in one month. Desperate to escape the cramped apartment she shares with her husband Ian -- and in turn, get their marriage, plan to have a baby, and whole life back on track -- Margo becomes obsessed with buying the house before it's publicly listed and the masses descend (with unbeatable, all-cash offers in hand).
A little stalking? Harmless. A bit of trespassing? Necessary. As Margo infiltrates the homeowners' lives, her tactics grow increasingly unhinged--but just when she thinks she's won them over, she hits a snag in her plan. Undeterred, Margo will prove again and again that there's no boundary she won't cross to seize the dream life she's been chasing. The most unsettling part? You'll root for her, even as you gasp in disbelief.
Dark, biting, and laugh-out-loud funny, Best Offer Wins is a propulsive debut and a razor-sharp exploration of class, ambition, and the modern housing crisis.
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Book Details
ISBN:
9781250400543
EAN:
9781250400543
Binding:
Hardcover
Pages:
288
Authors:
Marisa Kashino
Publisher:
Celadon Books
Loved this book and highly recommend it. Perfect mixture of humor, mystery, and great characters. Hoping to read much more from this author in the future.
This is a fast, fun, entertaining read. Almost believable/unbelievable. But what a nice break from the holiday scramble. I really enjoyed it. Crazy? For sure!
Margo, you crazy crazy girl.
Book Review: Best Offer Wins by Marisa Kashino 🏡As someone who house-hunted during the height of the low interest rate frenzy, this book’s premise hit close to home. The 20+ offer bidding wars, the waived contingencies, the pressure to decide in minutes, and hearing “Best and Final” drove me up a freakin wall.Here, we follow Margo, a woman pushed to the edge by a brutal housing market and her own expectations of what a successful life should look like. She is ten or so rejected offers deep and still day-dreaming of her perfect house in the perfect neighborhood in the DC suburbs (oh, and her husband is there, too). Kashino captures that mix of desperation, painful optimism, and quiet panic that comes with trying to secure a home in an impossible market. The first 100 pages were my favorite. full of sharp tension, high stakes, and darkly funny commentary around DC life, marriage, wealth, and the modern family.As the story continued, some of the plot turns stretched my suspension of disbelief (I am a skeptical reader...), and certain character decisions felt a bit too extreme compared to the more grounded beginning of the novel. Still, I found myself cringing, laughing, and unable to look away from Margo’s life choices chapter-by-chapter. She’s an intentionally unlikeable protagonist, and the book leans into that discomfort in a way that reminded me of R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface or even the slow, escalating tension of the film Parasite.Overall, I enjoyed the ride. It’s an impressive debut about the expectations we have for ourselves and the lengths we’ll go to make those (dis?)illusions real. A solid 3.5 stars and an easy recommendation for anyone who loves messy protagonists, dark humor, and books that push everyday situations into something unsettling. Or just real estate trauma.
I chose this for my Book of the Month book. Holy guacamole, so I was totally with the main character until the middle to end. She did some seriously questionable and shady things to obtain the house of her dreams meanwhile she wasn’t the only one lying about her “double life”. It’s a true testament to “not everything is perfect” even if you did everything perfectly. The American Dream is not what it seems. (Don’t worry, no spoilers here.) While there’s a national housing crisis still going on and probably not going to end any time soon, what lengths would you go to in order to end up with your dream house? Personally, I remember a few years ago having a budget and only a few houses popping up once in a while. Glad the looking and worrying is over for us, we thought it’d never end.
