Iris

Elegant, intimate, nuanced and electric, Iris is alive to the powers of language and literature, probing desire, connection and the self with singular style and flair.

When Iris and Bowen meet at an artists’ residency, the connection is immediate. Both are married to other people, but their long, riveting debates and stolen moments make Iris, an author struggling with writer’s block, feel newly alive.

After they return to their lives in New York City, their spiky repartee continues with impassioned debates about books, reflections on a shared Chinese-American heritage and confessions of mutual attraction.

When the ticking time bomb of a possible affair becomes impossible to ignore, they meet up for an epic, day-long date that will decide their future.

Reviews

‘Imagine an intellectual offspring of Albert Camus and Muriel Spark in the 21st century, and we get Weike Wang. Iris approaches life’s eternal mysteries – love, desire, creativity – with astute observation, philosophical dissection, and, most important of all, razor sharp humour. It’s a novel that makes us laugh, sigh, and ponder’ Yiyun Li, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Book of Goose

‘Move over Anna Karenina, and say hello to Iris. She's the brilliant, hilarious, and beautifully rendered adultery-adjacent heroine of Weike Wang's new novel. You're going to love this book’ Gary Shteyngart, author of Our Country Friends

‘Weike Wang forces the romantic novel to finally grow up in this tender, erudite investigation into the purpose of desire. In lean prose she sets ambition, money, sex, and moral obligation against one another, and what claws its way out of that struggle is even more interesting – the deeper meaning of an artist’s true life. Rarely has the story of a woman's search for wisdom been this sexy and satisfying’ Honor Jones, author of Sleep

‘Read this book for the simple pleasure of watching Weike Wang put one surprising word beside another, but Iris is also a beautiful, raw story of discovery, a piercing novel for the yearners, for artists and writers, for anyone who's ever wondered what if. I read it in one sitting’ Katie Yee, author of Maggie; or, A Man and A Woman Walk Into a Bar

‘Weike Wang transforms the details of ordinary life into a luminescent, page-turning life force. I was mesmerized by Iris until the final line’ Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise

About the author

Weike Wang is the author of 4 novels. She is the recipient of a PEN/Hemingway Award, a Whiting Award and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine and has won two O. Henry Prizes. She earned her MFA from Boston University and her other degrees from Harvard. She currently lives in New York City and has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Barnard College and Boston University.