The Summer Without Men
'Alarmingly funny' - TLS
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3.2 • 6 Ratings
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- £5.49
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
FROM THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF WHAT I LOVED
'Funny, moving and erudite, playfully reminding us of a contemporary Jane Austen'
Daily Mail
'Astoundingly joyful'
Guardian
'Alarmingly funny'
Times Literary Supplement
After Mia's husband of thirty years asks for a 'pause', to indulge his infatuation with a young French colleague, she briefly breaks down before retreating to the prairie town of her childhood, to rage and reassess her life.
Slowly, however, she's drawn into the lives of the women around her: her mother's circle of feisty widows, her young neighbour with two small children, the teenage girls in her poetry class. As Mia faces her summer without men, she must discover what's worth fighting for - and on whose terms.
'A rich and intelligent meditation on female identity'
Sunday Times
'A mordant comedy'
Observer
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A theatrically manic poet turns heartbreak into an intellectual endeavor in Hustvedt's intellectually spry latest (after The Sorrows of an American). Fresh out of the hospital at age 55 following a breakdown brought on by her husband's departure for a young colleague referred to as "The Pause," award-winning poet and Columbia professor Mia Fredricksen flees Brooklyn to spend the summer in her Minnesota hometown. There she is in the company of her mother and four other feisty old ladies, the young mother next door, and the seven hormone-addled pubescent girls enrolled in her poetry class at the local arts guild. Mia sorts out her agony as only a scorned woman with a Ph.D. in comparative literature can by pouring it through a sieve of poets, philosophers, and critical theorists. At times these references eclipse the presence of the narrator herself, but even this absence becomes the basis for philosophical rumination, as Mia corresponds online with the anonymous and at times abusive Mr. Nobody. Though initially trapped in a claustrophobic cerebral solitude, Mia opens up, and, in so doing, lets in some much needed air to a constricted narrative, so that instead of being another novel of a woman on the brink, this becomes an adroit take on love, men and women, and girls and women.
