Best Offer Wins

by Marisa Kashino · 2025

First published 2025 · 288 pages · English

15 quotes ★ 3.70 (103,812) Thriller

Quotes from the Book

Time really is a motherfucker—and it has never once been on my side. I have been racing against something, or toward something for as long as I can remember. Racing to grow up and get away. Racing against deadlines. Racing to make enough money. To start a family. To find the house. To feel like I’ve finally made it. To feel like I can finally just live.

If I'd learned anything from my parents' fucked-up marriage, it was that making the other person think they're in control when they're really not is often the easiest way to win a fight.

But when you're staring down the barrel of turning thirty-eight, you can't afford to take any chances.

What makes you a man is not the ability to make a child. It’s the courage to raise one.” —Barack Obama.

I have been racing against something, or toward something for as long as I can remember. Racing to grow up and get away. Racing against deadlines. Racing to make enough money. To start a family. To find the house. To feel like I’ve finally made it. To feel like I can finally just live.

That was about when I started to feel angry all the time. The tight mound of rage simply took up residence one day

Is he playing misogyny bingo or something?

She rolls her eyes. “You’re always wound so tight

That is some good shit right there.” He laughs dryly. “Yeah

The payout on the other side—once the city’s hottest restaurants have opened a few blocks away

Are we feeling spicy this morning?" Shannon asks. "I think we've got a spicy bunch here!" ... I do not know what gave her that impression.

This, I've gathered, is one of the shitty parts about having children: if your kid makes a best friend, you have to figure out a way to tolerate their parents, no matter how much they suck.

I know I'm not supposed to care about gender, or even acknowledge it as anything more than a social construct, but I really would prefer a girl.

We'd debated "Gunshots or fireworks?" almost as frequently as "Mexican or Thai food?

A surge of hope, that familiar poison, makes my heart stutter.

Did you know?

It is Marisa Kashino's debut novel.
The book was optioned by Hulu for a streaming series.
It was a Good Morning America Book Club Pick and a USA Today bestseller.
The story was inspired by Kashino's years as a journalist reporting on the Washington, D.C. real estate industry.
ELLE and Book Riot both named it among the best mystery/thrillers of 2025.

About Marisa Kashino

Marisa Kashino is an American author and former journalist who spent roughly seventeen years in reporting, much of it at The Washington Post and Washingtonian magazine. Her experience covering the Washington, D.C. real estate market inspired her debut novel, "Best Offer Wins."

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About the book

"Best Offer Wins" is the debut novel of Marisa Kashino, a darkly comic thriller set in the overheated real estate market of the Washington, DC suburbs. It follows Margo Miyake, a 37-year-old publicist who, after eighteen months and eleven lost bidding wars, becomes fixated on a seemingly perfect house slated to hit the market. Desperate to escape the cramped apartment she shares with her husband Ian and to get her stalled life back on track, Margo grows increasingly obsessed with securing the home before it is publicly listed.

Through Margo's mounting fixation, the novel skewers the modern housing crisis and the anxieties of ambition, class, and the elusive promise of the white picket fence. It uses the competitive frenzy of bidding wars as a lens on marriage, the pressure to reach conventional milestones, and how the pursuit of a dream home can curdle into something darker.

The book was widely promoted on publication, becoming a USA Today bestseller and a Good Morning America Book Club Pick, and it was named among ELLE's and Book Riot's best mystery/thrillers of 2025. It was optioned by Hulu for a streaming series. Kashino drew on her years as a journalist covering the DC real estate industry to ground the story's setting.