Hausfrau - Softcover

Essbaum, Jill Alexander

3.24

15,543 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1509816984 ISBN 13: 9781509816989

Publisher: Picador, 2015

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Haunting and elegant, Hausfrau is the exceptional debut novel from the prize-winning American poet, Jill Alexander Essbaum.

Anna was a good wife, mostly . . .

Anna Benz lives in comfort and affluence with her husband and three young children in Dietlikon, a picture-perfect suburb of Zurich. Anna, an American expat, has chosen this life far from home; but, despite its tranquility and order, inside she is falling apart.

Feeling adrift and unable to connect with her husband or his family; with the fellow expatriates who try to befriend her; or even, increasingly, her own thoughts and emotions, Anna attempts to assert her agency in the only way that makes sense to her: by engaging in short-lived but intense sexual affairs.

But adultery, too, has its own morality, and when Anna finds herself crossing a line, she will set off a terrible chain of events that ends in unspeakable tragedy. As her life crashes down around her, Anna must then discover where one must go when there is no going back . . .

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Review:

Haunting . . . Beautifully written, the ennui of its Anna Karenina-esque heroine's deceptively perfect life as a Swiss housewife seeps from every page (Best books of 2015, Harper’s Bazaar)

Hausfrau may be the Fifty Shades of literary fiction . . . This debut brilliantly chronicles a woman's
life falling apart . . . The novel's mood is, like Anna's, dreamy and dissociated . . . It is a brilliantly sustained examination of self-induced loneliness and pathological alienation.

(The Times)

It's the book that will have everyone talking . . . (Cosmopolitan)

This slow-burning literary novel of marital disintegration will leave you in bits. It's a bleak, but beautiful read, with echoes of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. (Glamour)

A racy mix of Gone Girl and 50 Shades. (Grazia)

There are echoes in Hausfrau of those other frustrated wives, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina . . . Torn between the identities of docile housewife and erotic adventuress, Anna is fragmented. Essbaum is an acclaimed poet and at moments her prose takes on a lyrical concentration. Scottish Archie speaks "a queue of vowels rammed into one another like a smithy's bellows pressed hotly closed" . . .
It's refreshing to discover a female protagonist who is allowed to be quite such a casual wife, such a detached mother, such an unromantic lover . . . That, in the end, is the subversive thing about Anna: not her libido or her secret affairs, but her refusal to feel quite as copiously as women are expected to, her refusal to make herself likeable. She neither courts our approval nor dodges our judgement.

(Independent on Sunday)

It is that impossible thing: a page-turner about depression. I admired its cool, European tone; its refusal to evince any anxiety at all about "privilege"; its equivocation about pretty much everything save for the Swiss national character . . .Most of all, I liked the fact that Essbaum gives us no sweeteners in the matter of Anna's character. She is difficult. She is boring. She is narcissistic. She is so very sad. (Observer)

With an elegance, precision and surehandedness that recalls Marguerite Duras's The Lover and Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac, Jill Alexander Essbaum gives us this exquisite tale of an expatriate American wife living in Switzerland and her sexual and psychic unraveling. Hausfrau stuns with its confidence and severe beauty, its cascading insights into the uses of erotic life and the nature of secrets, the urgency of compulsion and the difficulty of freedom. A rare and remarkable debut. (Janet Fitch, bestselling author of White Oleander)

An exceptional debut . . . [with] a heart-stopping climax . . . this portrait of a woman on the edge lingers long in the memory. (The Bookseller)

I read this at a sitting, transfixed by this insightful and shocking portrait of a woman on the edge. (Fanny Blake Woman and Home)

Book Description:

An extraordinary debut literary page-turner with echoes of Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina

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