An Abundance of Katherines

An Abundance of Katherines is a young adult novel by the American writer John Green, published in 2006.

Colin Singleton has been a prodigy since he could read, has been dumped by nineteen girls called Katherine, and is afraid that he has already used up whatever made him clever in the first place. After graduating from high school he is persuaded by his best and only friend, Hassan Harbish, to go on a road trip to take his mind off the last of them. The two of them end up in Gutshot, Tennessee, at a mine shaft said to be connected to the death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and there they meet Lindsey Lee Wells and her mother Hollis, who owns the local textile mill.

Hollis gives them summer work interviewing the town's residents and putting together an oral history of the place. While he does it, Colin works at a formula that he hopes will predict how any relationship will end and who will do the dumping, which is his way of trying to make sense of the whole sequence of Katherines. He has a particular reason for wanting the formula to be right this time, and it is not that Lindsey is called Katherine.