Rent Hausfrau: A Novel

Synopsis

"Madame Bovary meets Fifty Shades of Grey."*
 
Anna was a good wife, mostly. For readers of The Girl on the Train and The Woman Upstairs comes a striking debut novel of marriage, fidelity, sex, and morality, featuring a fascinating heroine who struggles to live a life with meaning—"a modern-day Anna Karenina tale."**
 
ONE OF THE HUFFINGTON POST'S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2015

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, well-appointed life, Anna is falling apart inside. Adrift and increasingly unable to connect with the emotionally unavailable Bruno or even with her own thoughts and 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 even her.
 
But Anna can't easily extract herself from these affairs. When she wants to end them, she finds it's difficult. Tensions escalate, and her lies start to spin out of control. Having crossed a moral threshold, Anna will discover where a woman goes when there is no going back.
 
Intimate, intense, and written with the precision of a Swiss Army knife, Jill Alexander Essbaum's debut novel is an unforgettable story of marriage, fidelity, sex, morality, and most especially self. Navigating the lines between lust and love, guilt and shame, excuses and reasons, Anna Benz is an electrifying heroine whose passions and choices readers will debate with recognition and fury. Her story reveals, with honesty and great beauty, how we create ourselves and how we lose ourselves and the sometimes disastrous choices we make to find ourselves.
 
Praise for Hausfrau

"Sexy and insightful, this gorgeously written novel opens a window into one woman's desperate soul."—People

"With an elegance, precision, and surehandedness that recalls Marguerite Duras's The Lover and Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac, Jill Alexander Essbaum gives us this exquisite tale of an expatriate American wife living in Switzerland and her sexual and psychic unraveling. Hausfrau stuns with its confidence and severe beauty, its cascading insights into the uses of erotic life and the nature of secrets, the urgency of compulsion and the difficulty of freedom. This is a rare and remarkable debut."—Janet Fitch, #1 New York Times bestselling author of White Oleander
 
"The realism of Anna's dilemmas and the precise construction of the novel are marvels of the form. . . . [Hausfrau] is masterly as it moves toward its own inescapable ending, and Anna is likely to provoke strong feelings in readers well after the final page."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
"I was mesmerized by this book. Hausfrau creates a complete, engrossing, and particular world where nothing is as easy as it should be, according to the hopeful stories we tell ourselves. It's a corrective novel, taking character, destiny, and our choices as seriously as a novelist can."—Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?

"A racy mix of Gone Girl and Fifty Shades."—Grazia (U.K.)

*Sunday Express (U.K.)
**Glamour (U.K.)


From the Hardcover edition.

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