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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

WAYWARD

Dana Spiotta

FROM THE ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF INNOCENTS AND OTHERS AND STONE ARABIA, a moving and
humorous new novel for readers of Joan Didion, Jennifer Egan, Don DeLillo and Meg Wolitzer, about mothers
and daughters, and one woman's midlife reckoning.
On the heels of the election of 2016, Samantha Raymond's life begins to come apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and at 52, she finds herself staring into "the Mids" – that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood, mortality, and, in this case, the state of an unraveling nation.

When she falls in love with a beautiful, decrepit house in a hardscrabble neighborhood in Syracuse, she buys it on a whim and flees her suburban life--and her family--as she grapples with how to be a wife, a mother, and a daughter, in a country that is coming apart at the seams.

DANA SPIOTTA is the author of INNOCENTS AND OTHERS, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and The St. Francis College Literary Prize; STONE ARABIA, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; EAT THE DOCUMENT, a finalist for the National Book Award; and LIGHTNING FIELD. A Guggenheim Fellow and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, she was also awarded the 2008 Rome Prize in Literature and the 2017 John Updike Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Syracuse and teaches in the Syracuse University MFA program.
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Published 2021-07-01 by Knopf

Comments

“furious and addictive” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/books/review-wayward-dana-spiotta.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/books/july-2021-new-books.html

La Nave di Teseo

“Best Books to Read in 2021” Wayward is a hymn to iconoclasm, a piercing novel about what we lose and gain by when we step out of life's deepest worn grooves. — Taylor Antrim full review: Agile intelligence combines with an almost ruthless lack of sentimentality in the novels of Dana Spiotta, from 2001's Lightning Field to 2016's Innocents and Others. These are gloriously cool books, deftly assembled, brimming with mood—and full of outcasts and misfits who can't quite assimilate to modern culture. For fans of Spiotta, her fifth novel, Wayward, is something new: a strikingly human and affecting story of a woman in her fifties going through what you might call, in a more ordinary book, a midlife crisis. In Wayward, Sam's flight out of conventional suburban housewifery is turned over with a kind of forensic (and mordantly hilarious) scrutiny. In the opening pages she leaves her husband and buys a very specific tumbledown house in the decrepit heart of downtown Syracuse, New York. She then plunges into various obsessions: quasi-feminist Facebook groups, nightwalking, stand up comedy, weightlifting. Through it all Sam both yearns for her teenage daughter, Ally—who is furious at her mother for leaving the family—and refuses to fit any expectations of what a good mother should be. Wayward is a hymn to iconoclasm, a piercing novel about what we lose and gain by when we step out of life's deepest worn grooves. — Taylor Antrim Read more...

https://chireviewofbooks.com/2021/07/13/wayward-dana-spiotta/

by Claire Messud, https://harpers.org/archive/2021/07/new-books-july-2021-spiotta-wayward-mairal-woman-from-urugu-sahota-china-roomay/

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.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/11/22/books/notable-books.html “100 Notable Books of 2021”

“exhilarating a virtuosic, singular and very funny portrait of a woman seeking sanity and purpose in a world gone mad.” Read more...

https://slate.com/culture/2021/07/wayward-dana-spiotta-midlife-crisis-novel-review.html

Virago/ Little Brown

Top 10 books of the year 2021 Read more...