“As gripping as it is hilarious.” — Vanity Fair
“I devoured this novel . . . It just made my whole being vibrate and hum with the impossible, inevitable business of loving other people.” — Leslie Jamison, New York Times best-selling author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering
For Phillipa Maakestad—theater professor and mother to a troubled, volatile daughter—life is finally, miraculously calm. What better moment, then, to fall headlong into a passionate affair, fly off to France with her new lover, and effectively take a match to her life on the Iowa prairie?
As she steps back to survey the damage and determine her way forward, Phillipa must contend with a wedding-day tornado, a menace of a mother-in-law who may or may not have been a Nazi collaborator, and the tragicomic revenge fantasies