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Published Feb 2023
208 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
From the acclaimed author of Miss Burma, longlisted for the National Book Award and the Women's Prize for Fiction, comes an immersive and searing story of two women, their marriages, and the rivalry between them.
Tessa is a successful writer who develops a friendship, first by correspondence and then in person, with Charlie, a ruggedly handsome philosopher and scholar based in Los Angeles. Sparks fly as they exchange ideas about Camus and masculine desire, and their intellectual connection promises more—but there are obstacles to this burgeoning relationship.
While Tessa's husband Milton enjoys Charlie's company on his visits to the East Coast, Charlie's wife Wah is a different case, and she proves to be both adversary and conundrum to Tessa. Wah's traditional femininity and subservience to her husband strike Tessa as weaknesses, and she scoffs at the sacrifices Wah makes as adoptive mother to a Burmese girl, Htet, once homeless on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. But Wah has a kind of power too, especially over Charlie, and the conflict between the two women leads to a martini-fueled declaration by Tessa that Wah is "an insult to womankind." As Tessa is forced to deal with the consequences of her outburst and considers how much she is limited by her own perceptions, she wonders if Wah is really as weak as she has seemed, or if she might have a different kind of strength altogether.
Compassionate and thought-provoking, My Nemesis is a brilliant story of seduction, envy, and the ways we publicly define and privately deceive ourselves today.
"The complicated relationship between memoirist Tessa and professor and philosopher Charlie becomes an entry to a layered exploration of the perception of the self and the outside world ... A simple plot summary cannot capture the depth of Craig's treatment of such big themes as femininity and masculinity, motherhood and fatherhood, friendship and love ... Craig offers an effective inquiry into the elusive nature of intimate relationships, whether they stem from love or hate." - Booklist (starred review)
"An intense portrayal of an intellectual affair as well as a private competition between two women with perfectly balanced moments of tension and introspection ... Craig never lets her first-person narrator off the hook ... Cerebral and tense." - Kirkus Reviews
"A swift and cutting examination of rivalry between two women ... The writing is biting and propulsive as allegiances shift ... This confident work is sure to spark conversations." - Publishers Weekly
"A blisteringly smart novel about feminism, identity and desire that refuses easy answers and will linger for a long time in my mind." - Monica Ali, author of Love Marriage
"As deeply empathic as it is thrillingly addictive, My Nemesis is a stunning and brave literary feat. Charmaine Craig's searing prose and complex vision challenges us to abandon the safety and certainty of our own perspectives. What begins as a novel of female rivalry quickly transforms into a profound spiritual meditation on the danger of our inability—or unwillingness—to imagine and dignify the inner life of the other. With luminous grace, Craig's writing is a testament to the transcendent power and peace possible when we dare to try." - Fatima Farheen Mirza, author of A Place for Us
"My Nemesis is an exhilarating act of defiance, a novel that lights a match and sends the whole question of female characters' likability up in flames. Charmaine Craig is a writer unafraid of contradictions—at once elegant and unruly, cool yet searing—and here she's given us a fiercely philosophical novel that is also irresistibly, addictively readable." - Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Likes
"Charmaine Craig's My Nemesis is a spellbinding highwire act ... a brutal exposition of the destructive underside of desire and the fragility of familial bonds. Craig's cutting sentences reveal how easily the life of the mind, sublime and addictive, can be transformed into a weapon that decimates lives. Perhaps most brilliantly, My Nemesis is a warning against the quiet grafting of racial power dynamics onto our most intimate networks of love. My Nemesis is a riveting clear-eyed burn of a book. Read it now!" - Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, author of Savage Tongues
This information about My Nemesis was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Charmaine Craig is the author of the novels Miss Burma, longlisted for the National Book Award and the Women's Prize for Fiction, and The Good Men. Formerly an actor, she teaches in the program in fiction at UC Riverside and lives in Los Angeles.
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