Novel_About_My_Wife
2010 Longlist

Novel About My Wife

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ABOUT
THE BOOK

Tom Stone, skinnyish, fortyish, English, is madly in love with his wife Ann, an Australian in self-imposed exile in London. Pushing forty and expecting their first child, they buy their first, semi-derelict house in Hackney. They believe this is their settled future, despite Tom’s stalling career and their spiralling money troubles.
But Ann becomes convinced she’s being shadowed by a local homeless man whose presence seems like a terrible omen. As her pregnancy progresses she spends hours cleaning and reorganising the house, and sits up all night talking with a new feverish passion. As their child grows, so too does Tom’s sense of an impending, nameless threat. Their home appears beset with vermin, smells and strange noises. On the verge of losing the house, Tom makes a decision that he hopes will save their lives.
Dark, sensuous and utterly compelling, Novel About My Wife is a taut, chilling novel about the need for escape and the perils of forgetting.

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR Emily
Perkins

Emily Perkins is the author of a prize-winning collection of short stories, Not Her Real Name, and four novels, including Novel About My Wife (winner of the NZ Book Award and the Believer Magazine Book of the Year, and The Forrests (longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction). Her work for stage and screen includes co-writing the film adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s novel The Rehearsal (dir. Alison Maclean), an adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and the original play The Made. She lives in New Zealand.

Emily Perkins is the author of a prize-winning collection of short stories, Not Her Real Name, and four novels, including Novel About My Wife (winner of the NZ Book Award and the Believer Magazine Book of the Year, and The Forrests (longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction). Her work for stage and screen includes co-writing the film adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s novel The Rehearsal (dir. Alison Maclean), an adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and the original play The Made. She lives in New Zealand.

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NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS

Set in London, this is a sophisticated and disturbing novel by one of New Zealand’s most popular writers.

This novel captures the zeitgeist of world facing economic and environmental ruin by focusing on one couple facing their own.

A masterfully written, dark suspenseful novel about love, life and relationships and what is chosen to remember.

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