The Wife
Read an extract
Play sample
  • Published: 22 January 2015
  • ISBN: 9781448180516
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224

The Wife

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Oct 2004
EBook
22 Jan 2015
Audiobook
6 Sep 2018
Paperback
26 Jul 2018
Buy from…
Amazon Apple Books Google Play Kobo Booktopia eBooks.com

The tie-in edition for the major motion picture starring Glenn Close, Jonathan Pryce and Christian Slater

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING GLENN CLOSE

A husband. A wife. A secret. Behind any great man, there’s always a greater woman.

Joe and Joan Castleman are on an aeroplane, 35,000 feet above the ocean. Joe is thinking about the prestigious literary prize he is about to receive and Joan is plotting how to leave him. For too long Joan has played the role of supportive wife, turning a blind eye to his misdemeanours, subjugating her own talents and quietly being the keystone of his success.

The Wife is an acerbic and astonishing take on a marriage from its public face to the private world behind closed doors. Wolitzer has masterfully created an expose of lives lived in partnership and the truth that behind the compromises, dedication and promise inherent in marriage there so often lies a secret...

‘A triumph of tone and observation, The Wife is a blithe, brilliant take on sexual politics’ Lorrie Moore
  • Published: 22 January 2015
  • ISBN: 9781448180516
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Meg Wolitzer

Meg Wolitzer is the author of several acclaimed novels, including The Uncoupling (‘tingles with playfulness and wicked observation’ Independent), The Wife (‘has you howling with recognition’ Allison Pearson), The Position (‘one of the best and most human books I’ve read all year’ Erica Wagner) and The Ten-Year Nap (‘as incisive and pitiless and clear-eyed a chronicler of female-male tandems as Philip Roth or John Updike' Chicago Tribune). Most recently, The Interestings was a New York Times bestseller. She lives in New York City.

portrait photo of Meg Wolitzer

Also by Meg Wolitzer

The Female Persuasion
The Interestings
The Uncoupling
The Ten-Year Nap
The Position
See all

Praise for The Wife

A triumph of tone and observation, The Wife is a blithe, brilliant take on sexual politics

Lorrie Moore

Already a classic... and I have no idea why its author remains so less well known than her US compatriots, Alison Lurie and Lorrie Moore

Observer

Hilarious and touching

Erica Wagner, The Times

It’s funny, and it’s brilliant, and I press it on everyone I know

Rachel Cooke, BBC Radio 4, A Good Read

Meg Wolitzer is so funny and clever she should be bottled and sold as tonic

Allison Pearson

With a great lightness of touch, Wolitzer's novel satirises American literary circles of the Seventies and Eighties and traces the generation of wives who poured their own creative energies into "stoking the fires" of their husbands' reputations

Emma Hagestadt, Independent