*A New York Times Critics’ Top Book of the Year*

*A Best Book of the Year in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Vogue, and a New York Times Notable Book* 

“A furious and addictive new novel. . . .Spiotta’s fiction is rightfully praised for its structural innovation, its stylish commentary on technology and ‘the moment’—but her vision for the novel is fundamentally moral. . . .So much contemporary fiction swims about in its own theories; what a pleasure to encounter not just ideas about the thing, but the thing itself—descriptions that irradiate the pleasure centers of the brain, a protagonist so densely, exuberantly imagined, she feels like a visitation.”
—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

“Thrilling . . . .The novel is at once satirical and earnest: Sam asks what she can do to atone for her thoughtless privilege, what role she might play as an agent of change. There’s much comedy in the asking, but the novel makes clear that the answers aren’t straightforward. Spiotta offers grand themes and beautiful peripheral incidents . . . she writes with sly humor and utter seriousness; a rare articulation of midlife now. For this reader, there is uncommon pleasure in the paradoxes of this climacteric tale.”
—Claire Messud, Harper’s

“Exhilarating. Wayward reads like a burning fever dream. A virtuosic, singular and very funny portrait of a woman seeking sanity and purpose in a world gone mad.”
—Joanna Rakoff, The New York Times Book Review

“Masterful. . . a mordant, coruscating indictment of these times, liberal politics, affluenza, self improvement and social identity. . . [Spiotta] swings for the fences. Wayward explores the ironies and frailties of modern life, the human tendency to constantly gaze inward to become better, to move further.”
—Karen Heller, The Washington Post

“Spiotta is one of the most alert, ambitious, nuanced, and, yes, smartest of our contemporary novelists. . . . Here, architecture connects to Wayward’s larger meditations about impermanence and decay—human, structural and even national.”
—Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air

“Breathtaking. . . . a book that masterfully explores the pressures of being a woman in a hostile society. . . The characters are stubbornly defiant, and Spiotta does a wonderful job depicting [Sam and her daughter Ally] in their twin rebellions. A strikingly intelligent book, sometimes funny, sometimes painful. . . . A brilliant novel with love—never a simple subject—at its core.”
—Michael Schaub, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A comic, vital new novel. . . If Wayward has competition in the category of best American novel devoted to the subject of perimenopause, I am not aware of it. . . . [Spiotta] is satirizing her own demographic, and with verve.”
—Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker

“If there’s any justice in the world, Spiotta’s firecracker of a novel, Wayward, will bring her the attention she very much deserves.”
—Lucy Scholes, Sunday Telegraph

“Defiantly, poignantly a novel of middle age. . . One of the many strengths of [Wayward] is its unflinching portrayal of anger both personal and collective.”
—Michele Filgate, Los Angeles Times

“Sam dissects many flavors of contemporary delusion and distraction with consummate precision. . . . Simmering under Spiotta’s deceptively breezy, fluid description of everyday life in 2017 Syracuse are large and perplexing questions about the eternal interplay of idealism and pragmatism, of the longing for a better world and the reality of human frailty.”
—Laura Miller, Slate

“With each novel, [Spiotta] tethers herself to a moment in time, devising original interviews and transcripts from the period with such verisimilitude that it can take a moment for the reader to realize these too are part of the author’s magic trick . . . Spiotta is unsurprisingly great on the brute facts of middle age.”
—Sloane Crosley, The New York Review of Books

“Simultaneously moving, humane, and funny, this novel explores the complexities women must navigate as they inhabit the interstitial spaces between their roles as women, mothers, daughters, and wives, all while the country titters on the edge of collapse.”
—Gabino Iglesias, The Boston Globe

“Riddled with insights into aging, womanhood, and discontent, Wayward is as elegant as it is raw, and almost as funny as it is sad. Spiotta will kick your heart’s ass.”
—Patrick Rapa, Philadelphia Inquirer

“Razor-sharp. . . Wayward stands tall in its representation of these harried times.”
—Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle

“In Wayward Spiotta continues her quiet run at the front of American fiction, with a novel that achieves ends sometimes thought exclusive: formal innovation and profound emotion.”
—Alexander Sammartino, The Millions.

“Gloriously cool, deftly assembled, brimming with mood. . . . Wayward is a strikingly human and affecting story.”
—Taylor Antrim, Vogue

“Spiotta writes beautifully about parenthood, aging, and other calamities that come with being alive in an unforgettable meditation on the indignities of life in the modern age.”
—Town & Country

“Wayward is a novel that captures middle age in all its charms and ugliness, in a way that seemingly only her and a few authors could manage.”
—Teddy Burnette, Chicago Review of Books

“This is a story about female desire and fulfillment, a woman realizing she’s fallen into roles she resents and giving in to the impulse to abandon them. Spiotta glides through her journey with sparkling prose, delving into the contradictions and complexities of being an aging woman—and raising a daughter who will one day do the same—in today’s America.”
—Arianna Rebolini, BuzzFeed

“An engrossing, interior mother-daughter story that expands into a sharp social commentary.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[A] wonderfully mischievous and witty story. . . A knockout.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Samantha immerses herself in Facebook groups dedicated to feminist resistance. However, her malaise is as potent as her yearning for activism. While trying to salvage a relationship with her daughter, she desperately searches for meaning in a world headed toward uncertain ruin.”
—Library Journal (starred review)

“What a thrilling experience to take a wayward journey along with Dana Spiotta’s heroine. . . . Wayward is a fiercely funny and deliciously subversive novel.”
—Yiyun Li

“A dazzling lightning bolt of a novel which illuminates the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes heartbreaking moments of connection and disconnection in our lives. What begins as a vertiginous leap into hilarious rabbit holes ends as a brilliant meditation on mortality and time.”
—Jenny Offill

“Wayward is razor-sharp on any number of things, above all the insoluble ravages of time.”
—Joshua Ferris

“An urgent, deeply moving, wholly original novel by one of the most wildly talented writers in America. This is Spiotta’s best book yet, rich with all the joyful immersion-in-culture that characterized her earlier work, and of which she is a master, but with, it seems to me, more heart, hope, and urgency. There’s not a smarter, more engaging, more celebratory writer working today than Dana Spiotta, and here she shows us to ourselves with stunning, sometimes lacerating, honesty, but also with a feeling of genuine hope for us, i.e., with kindness.”
—George Saunders

WAYWARD

A moving, funny, engrossing novel about mothers and daughters, and one woman’s midlife reckoning, from the renowned author of Stone Arabia and Eat the Document

On the heels of the election of 2016, Samantha Raymond’s life begins to come apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and at fifty-two she finds herself staring into “the Mids”–that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood, mortality, and, in this case, the state of our unraveling nation.

When she falls in love with a beautiful, decrepit house in a hardscrabble neighborhood in Syracuse, she buys it on a whim and flees her suburban life–and her family–as she grapples with how to be a wife, a mother, and a daughter, in a country that is coming apart at the seams.

Dana Spiotta’s Wayward is a stunning novel about aging, about the female body, and about female difficulty–female complexity–in the age of Trump. Probing and provocative, brainy and sensual, it is a testament to our weird, off-kilter America, to reforms and resistance and utopian wishes, and to the beauty of ruins. Tremendous new work from one of the most gifted writers of her generation.