Free shipping on orders over $99
Novel about My Wife

Novel about My Wife

by Emily Perkins
Paperback
Publication Date: 01/01/2009

Share This Book:

 
From one of Britain's most exciting young writers comes the story of a couple's emotional and complicated relationship ... from the husband's perspective. Novel About My Wife is narrated by Tom Stone as he searches through the mysteries his wife has left him with. The reader is left to discover what dark thing has come between him and his beloved partner.

Tom Stone is, as well as being cheerfully neurotic, madly in love with his wife Ann, an Australian in self-imposed exile in London. Pushing forty and newly pregnant, they buy their first house in Hackney. It seems they are moving into a settled future, despite spiralling money troubles. But Ann is dogged by a local homeless man whose constant presence comes to feel like a terrible omen. As her pregnancy progresses Ann finds solace in her new friendship with Kate, a woman Tom is both repelled by and peculiarly drawn to. Their home is beset with vermin, smells and strange noises. Is this normal for London, or is the measure of normality in this city actually mad?

Novel About My Wife is Tom's effort to understand this woman he has been so blindly in love with, and to peel back the past to see where the real threats in their lives were hiding. It is an investigation of guilt, love, forgiveness, and the perils of forgetting.

She wasn't one of those women who hate their feet, who hate their bodies, the kind who turn the sight of their ass in broad daylight into a state secret. (God, you just find yourself dying for a glimpse, you'll do anything to get it, hover outside the bathroom door, hide under a table, pull back the sheets when she's sleeping. Then because of all the mystery you end up, when you're finally feasting your eyes, thinking, 'hey, maybe she has got something to worry about.') Ann didn't care. Her body was open for viewing. It was one of the ways she distracted you from what was inside her head.
--from Novel About My Wife
ISBN:
9780385662253
9780385662253
Category:
Fiction
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
01-01-2009
Language:
English
Publisher:
Doubleday Canada
Country of origin:
Canada
Dimensions (mm):
203.2x127.25x19.56mm
Weight:
0.25kg
Emily Perkins

Emily Perkins is the author of a prize-winning collection of short stories, Not Her Real Name, and four novels, including Novel About My Wife (winner of the NZ Book Award and the Believer Magazine Book of the Year, and The Forrests (longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction).

Her work for stage and screen includes co-writing the film adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s novel The Rehearsal (dir. Alison Maclean), an adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and the original play The Made. She lives in New Zealand.

Click 'Notify Me' to get an email alert when this item becomes available

You can find this item in:

Show more Show less

Reviews

Be the first to review Novel about My Wife.