Wife

Poleaxed after finishing this. Charlotte Mendelson at her soul-searing best. Narcissistic monsters and suffocating families are quite the specialty of hers, but Wife is just unbearably brilliant – Nigella Lawson, bestselling author of Cook, Eat, Repeat
Wife is a gift to the reader in its gimlet-eyed and heartfelt observations, its irresistible sentences and its compassionate, sometimes surgical storytelling. Charlotte Mendelson tells the truth: slant, suspect, hidden, hard – and often hilarious – Amy Bloom, bestselling author of In Love
‘This is a love story,’ Zoe tells the reader, and it is, profoundly so, in the end. But I’ll remember it more as a thriller, for the way Mendelson manages to make what looks from the outside like a sad but unremarkable day – packing, Tube journeys – feel like sweaty offcuts from The Bourne Identity … God, you want Zoe to get away. Does she? Better read the book * The Sunday Times *
A family saga of great insight, with another magnificently grotesque villain at its heart * The Observer *
A clever, lacerating account of coercive control … a finely executed novel * Financial Times *
A deeply engaging exploration of a troubling and passionate affair, motherhood and personal transformation … Mendelson’s vibrant characters and richly detailed narrative provide a captivating look at the complexities of love and self-discovery. Compelling. * Glamour *
Mendelson is an extraordinary writer … Her characters are whole and complex, her tone crisp and familiar, her prose uncluttered and full of delightfully bitchy moments * Evening Standard *
Mendelson revels in the messiness of familial relationships, especially the ugly dramas that take place behind closed doors * TLS *
A terrific panic attack of a novel, a domestic horror story … Mendelson’s particular triumph is that this story is – perversely, incredibly – enjoyable, the kind of book to be wolfed down in a single excruciating sitting * i *
The heart of this novel is how Mendelson portrays, with some comedy alongside the horror, the disintegration of a marriage. The claustrophobic bullying is so well done that I found it nauseating. What is truly radical about Wife, however, is its portrayal of a contemporary lesbian couple behaving as dysfunctionally as a straight one might * The Spectator *

Charlotte Mendelson’s previous novel, The Exhibitionist, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was The Times Novel of the Year 2022, as well as a book of the year in The Guardian and Good Housekeeping. Her other novels include Almost English, which was longlisted for both the Man Booker and the Women’s Prize for Fiction; When We Were Bad, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and was a book of the year in The Observer, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The New Statesman and The Spectator; Daughters of Jerusalem, which won both the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; and Love in Idleness. Wife is her sixth novel.

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