A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • 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.Exhilarating ... 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.” —The New York Times Book
Review Samantha Raymond's life has begun to come apart: her mother is ill her teenage daughter
is increasingly remote and at fifty-two 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
our 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's Wayward is a stunning novel about aging about the
female body and about female complexity in contemporary America. Probing and provocative
brainy and sensual it is a testament to our weird times to reforms and resistance and utopian
wishes and to the beauty of ruins.
