The Other Wife
  • Published: 17 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9781405972017
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304
Categories:

The Other Wife

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
14 Oct 2025
EBook
17 Jul 2025
Audiobook
17 Jul 2025
Hardback
17 Aug 2025
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The Other Wife is a bold debut about race and class, love and nostalgia and learning to live with the life we have chosen

Susan ‘Zuzu’ Braeburn is almost forty. She has the life she’s always dreamed of – a beautiful house, a child, a successful partner. But something between her and Agnes has been off for a long time, and she can’t help but wonder ‘what if’.

What if she had chosen to live with her father instead of her mother after their divorce? To pursue art over law? And, most importantly, to pursue her feelings for her male best friend from college, Cash, instead of marrying Agnes?

When an unexpected loss takes her back to her hometown, over a single wintery weekend, the questions in Zuzu’s mind become too loud to ignore. She grapples with the choices she’s made and the knowledge that she doesn’t have infinite time to make changes in her life. The Other Wife speaks to unfulfilled desires and the euphoric nostalgia that’s particular to the beginning of middle age; it is heartfelt and daring in its reckoning with the quest for joy.
  • Published: 17 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9781405972017
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304
Categories:

Praise for The Other Wife

Extraordinary. A story about belonging in liminal spaces, and longing for things seemingly just out of reach. A searing, beautiful book

Kiley Reid, author of Such a Fun Age

The Other Wife captures the dizzy angst of young romance so well… following Zuzu over decades as she navigates growing up is a heart-rending, funny and relatable journey

Jessica Grose, author of Screaming on the Inside

Tender, wise, and thoroughly compelling, The Other Wife teems with the complicated pleasures and desolations of longing. Jackie Thomas-Kennedy knows a great deal about the life-shaping strength of desire.

R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries

I’ve followed Jackie Thomas-Kennedy’s work since I first read striking stories she published in literary magazines. The Other Wife, her first novel, chronicles the shifting desires of a woman in her late thirties who’s not sure she’s made the right life choices.

Electric Lit, 48 Books by Women of Color to Read in 2025

A probing, gorgeous novel about the intricacies of desire: for other loves, other lives, other versions of the self. The Other Wife is a remarkable debut

Kirstin Valdez Quade, author of THE FIVE WOUNDS and NIGHT AT THE FIESTAS

Humor! Verve! Soul! This novel has it all. In a moment where much literary fiction can sound and feel the same, The Other Wife sounds and feels both classic and like nothing I've encountered before

Emma Copley Eisenberg, nationally bestselling author of HOUSEMATES

Rich in Zuzu's lifelike conversations and interiority, Thomas-Kennedy's debut is a humbly expansive marriage story and a tale of growing older in lockstep with a version of yourself that gets to stay young

Booklist

This one is easy to dip in and out of between naps, chats and bodysurfing

Great Summer Beach Reads, New York Times
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