A Sharp Endless Need

A Novel

By: Marisa Crane

A propulsive and nostalgic coming-of-age novel about the relationship between two teammates on a rural high school basketball team, from the Lambda Award-winning author of I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself.

Star point guard Mack Morris’s senior year of high school begins with twin cataclysms: the death of her father and the arrival of transfer student Liv Cooper. On the court, Mack and Liv discover an exhilarating, game-winning chemistry; off the court, they fall into an equally intoxicating more-than-friendship that is out of bounds for their small Pennsylvania town in 2004, and especially, for Liv’s conservative mother. As Mack’s desire and grief collide with drugs, sex, and the looming college signing deadline, she is forced to reckon with the disconnects between her past and her future—and fight for the life she wants for herself, whether or not Liv will be on the court beside her.

Written with the lush longing of Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name and the obsessive attention of Jean Kyoung Frazier’s Pizza Girl, and with all the romance and feeling of the beloved 2000 movie Love & Basketball, Crane’s sophomore novel is a voice-driven, literary treatment of the big feelings of first love, intimacy, heartbreak, grief, and of course, sports.

©2025 Marisa Crane (P)2025 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“A Sharp Endless Need is a brilliant novel, so alive and vibrating that it took my breath away. Crane writes with piercing, heartbreaking insight about sacrificing the future for the present, with complex characters who navigate adolescence, desire, and basketball, and all the ways in which we make and break ourselves again and again. Crane is fearless, ferocious, and blessed with the kind of vision that lets you see everything in real time and find your way to something exceptional.”—Kevin Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Nothing to See Here

“A Sharp Endless Need is a vibrant, beautiful book not only brimming with stunning prose and sharp, quick dialogue but also offering a thoughtful and gentle meditation on the why behind affections: why people love what they love, what keeps people returning, what gets people to stay until they no longer can. It is a book that pushed me to reconsider devotion and the many shapes it can take.”—Hanif Abdurraqib, New York Times bestselling author of There’s Always This Year

“A poetic story about ambition, desire, grief, and love . . . Crane’s writing is honest, engrossing, and full of heart—a slam dunk.”—Emily Austin, author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead