Wayward
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Publisher Description
'Furious and addictive' New York Times
'Urgent, deeply moving, wholly original' GEORGE SAUNDERS
'A dazzling lightning bolt of a novel' JENNY OFFILL
'Fiercely funny and deliciously subversive' YIYUN LI
'Wayward reads like a burning fever dream. A virtuosic, singular and very funny portrait of a woman seeking sanity and purpose in a world gone mad' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
'***** If there's any justice in the world, Spiotta's firecracker of a novel, Wayward, will bring her the attention she very much deserves' Lucy Scholes, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
Samantha Raymond's life has begun to come apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and she finds herself staring into 'the Mids' - hours of supreme wakefulness when women of a certain age contemplate their lives. For Sam, this means motherhood, mortality and the state of an unravelling nation.
When Sam falls in love with a decrepit Arts and Crafts house on the wrong side of town, she buys it on a whim and flees her suburban life, attempting to find beauty in the ruins.
'One of the most wildly talented writers in America. This is Spiotta's best book yet' GEORGE SAUNDERS
'A slyly funny, clever and compelling story about the righteous (and rarely irrational) rage of women of a certain age' SARRA MANNING, RED magazine
'A piercing novel about what we lose and gain by when we step out of life's deepest worn grooves' VOGUE
'She writes with sly humour and utter seriousness; a rare articulation of midlife now' CLAIRE MESSUD
'What begins as a vertiginous leap into hilarious rabbit holes ends as a brilliant meditation on mortality and time. How does she do it? Only Dana Spiotta knows. I'm just happy to see her work her magic' JENNY OFFILL
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spiotta (Innocence and Others) draws up a love letter to Syracuse, N.Y., in this wonderfully mischievous and witty story of a 53-year-old woman who flees the suburbs for the city. In 2017, Sam Raymond divides her time between working part-time at a historical house for fictional suffragette and Oneida Community member Claire Loomis, and her "bored-housewife pastime of attending open houses." After swooning over a run-down bungalow designed by a locally treasured architect, she buys the house and leaves her husband, Matt, and 16-year-old daughter, Ally, without much of an explanation. Matt assumes she's leaving as part of her distraught reaction to Trump being elected president; it's true that Sam's outrage has peaked, and she's been going to meetings with other enraged women, which Spiotta renders with ingenious complexity. When a pair of younger women confronts a gathering of older white feminists ("All I know is that people our age, queer people, people of color—we didn't elect him," one of the young women says), Sam's reaction is mixed, as she feels caught between two generations. Sam then meets a self-described "Half Hobo" from an online "Crones" group, who advises Sam to resign herself to the coming apocalypse. But Sam still wants her life to have meaning, and she wants to reconnect with Ally, whose story of a secret affair with a 29-year-old man emerges in a parallel narrative. As Sam reckons with how Syracuse's history is viewed by a younger generation ("let's salvage, not savage"), Spiotta pulls off a surprising dive into the Loomis story, which informs Sam's relationship with her own mother and with Ally while shading in Sam's interest in local lore. This is a knockout.
