Synopsis
Hausfrau is the exceptional debut novel from the prize-winning American poet, Jill Alexander Essbaum. 'The Book that will have everyone talking' Cosmopolitan
Anna Benz, an American in her late-thirties, lives with her Swiss husband, Bruno - a banker - and their three young children, in a postcard-perfect suburb of Zürich.
Though she leads a comfortable life, she is falling apart inside. Adrift and increasingly unable to connect with Bruno, or even her own feelings, Anna tries to rouse herself with new experiences: German language classes, Jungian analysis, and a series of sexual affairs she enters with an ease that surprises her.
But she soon finds that she can't easily extract herself from these relationships. Having crossed a moral threshold, Anna will discover where a woman goes when there is no going back . . .
Details
Reviews
“I read this at a sitting, transfixed by this insightful and shocking portrait of a woman on the edge.”Fanny Blake, Woman and Home
“This novel had me from the first line: 'Anna was a good wife, mostly.' . . . An intense and chilling portrait of a woman on a mission to self-destruct.”Fanny Blake, Daily Mail
“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, Best books of 2015, Harper’s Bazaar
“Hausfrau may be the Fifty Shades of literary fiction . . . This debut brilliantly chronicles a woman's
”The Times, The Times
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.
