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'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
About the author
Dana Spiotta is the author of Innocents and Others, which won the St. Francis College Literary Prize and was short-listed for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Stone Arabia, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; Eat the Document, which was a National Book Award finalist; and Lightning Field. Spiotta was a Guggenheim Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and she won the 2008-9 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her the John Updike Prize in Literature. Spiotta lives in Syracuse and teaches in the Syracuse University MFA program.
Summary
A 'furious and addictive new novel' (The New York Times) about mothers and daughters, and one woman's midlife reckoning as she flees her suburban life.
Foreword
A 'furious and addictive new novel' (The New York Times) about mothers and daughters, and one woman's midlife reckoning as she flees her suburban life.
Additional text
Riddled with insights into aging, womanhood, and discontent, Wayward is as elegant as it is raw, and almost as funny as it is sad
Report
An urgent, deeply moving, wholly original novel by one of the most wildly talented writers in America. This is Spiotta's best book yet, rich with all the joyful immersion-in-culture that characterized her earlier work, and of which she is a master, but with, it seems to me, more heart, hope, and urgency. There's not a smarter, more engaging, more celebratory writer working today than Dana Spiotta, and here she shows us to ourselves with stunning, sometimes lacerating, honesty, but also with a feeling of genuine hope for us, i.e., with kindness. I finished the book last night and woke this morning both fonder of, and more terrified for, America George Saunders
