Novel About My Wife

Description

Title: Novel About My Wife
Author: Emily Perkins
Publisher: Bloomsbury, London, 2008
Format: Paperback
Condition: Good — thumbed second hand copy small neat inscription front page

Description:

Tom Stone is fortyish, English, madly in love with his wife Ann — an Australian in self-imposed exile in London. They are expecting their first child. They have bought a semi-derelict house in Hackney on the strength of a future they believe in. Then Ann becomes convinced she is being followed by a local homeless man. His presence feels like an omen. As her pregnancy advances and the house fills with vermin and strange noises and a feverish, sleepless energy, Tom’s sense of an impending, nameless threat grows alongside it. On the verge of losing everything, he makes a decision.

This is the novel Tom writes about Ann afterward. Which means we only ever have his version of her — filtered through his love, his fear, and his failure to fully see what was happening. Novel About My Wife is a study in the unreliable narrator taken to its gothic extreme: a husband who adores his wife and cannot save her, reconstructing her from the inside of his own perception.

Maggie O’Farrell put her name to it on the front cover: “A beautiful, shocking book, it had me gripped from its very first sentence.” Esther Freud called Perkins “brimming with talent.” T. C. Boyle: “Smart, funny and poignant… unique and surprising.”

Emily Perkins was born in Christchurch and came through Bill Manhire’s Victoria University creative writing programme in the 1990s. Her debut Not Her Real Name won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in the UK. Her later novel The Forrests was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. This is her second novel, published in London by Bloomsbury. She lives in New Zealand.

Why We Stock It:

A NZ writer working in the tradition of domestic gothic — the haunted house, the unreliable husband, the wife who cannot be adequately known. Endorsed by three significant international writers. Out of print in this Bloomsbury edition.