The Summer Without Men

"Exuberant... A lighter, more lilting meditation on men and women.... terrific writing... mulling the gifts and limits of art, sex, marriage." - San Francisco Chronicle
"And who among us would deny Jane Austen her happy endings or insist that Cary Grant and Irene Dunne should get back together at the end of The Awful Truth? There are tragedies and there are comedies, aren't there? And they are often more the same than different, rather like men and women, if you ask me. A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment."
Mia Fredrickson, the wry tragic comic, poet narrator of T he Summer Without Men, has been forced to reexamine her own life. One day, out of the blue, after thirty years of marriage, Mia's husband, a renowned neuroscientist, asks her for a "pause." This abrupt request sends her reeling and lands her in a psychiatric ward. The June following Mia's release from the hospital, she returns to the midwestern town of her childhood. Alone in a rented house, she rages and fumes and bemoans her sorry fate. Slowly, however, she is drawn into the lives of those around her-her mother and her close friends, "the Five Swans," and her young neighbor with two small children and a loud angry husband-and the adolescent girls in her poetry workshop whose scheming and petty cruelty carry a threat all their own.
From the author of What I Loved comes Siri Hustvedt's provocative and revelatory novel about the age-old question of the differences between the sexes.
"Honest, witty and empathetic." - The New York Times Book Review
"Satisfying." - Boston Globe
"Breathtaking... hilarious." - Booklist (starred review)

SIRI HUSTVEDT was born in 1955 in Northfield, Minnesota. She moved to New York City in 1978 and earned her Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia University in 1986. She is the author of several novels, including The Sorrows of an American, What I Loved, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, and The Blindfold, as well as the collections of essays, A Plea for Eros, Mysteries of the Rectangle, and The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Paul Auster.