Author(s): Charlotte Mendelson

Fiction - General | Fiction

A beautifully observed and coruscating novel about the joys of passionate love and motherhood, and those left behind in its wake when passion curdles. When Zoe Stamper, specialist in Ancient Greek Tragedy, meets fellow academic Dr Penny Cartwright at a faculty event, she seems impossibly glamorous. After all, Zoe is several rungs down the academic pecking order, and a nervous ing�nue as far as Penny's sophisticated circle is concerned. But Penny leaves Zoe a cryptic note, and a passionate affair ensues.

Once Penny confesses all to her live-in lover, Penny and Zoe move in together and their happiness seems assured. But there is something else Penny needs as badly in her life as Zoe's adoration, and thus the beginning of their affair might also have signalled its end. Set in the world of London academia, both past and present, Wife is heart-breaking and funny, profound and gripping, as Mendelson masterfully takes the reader from the end of a relationship to its beginning, and back again.