-
Access Our
Most Anticipated
Books of 2025!
The Booker-shortlisted author of Umbrella writes his most American novel yet—a brilliant portrait of a 1950s housewife, based on the life of the author's mother, and an exploration of sexual freedom and sublimated desire.
Will Self is one of the most inimitable contemporary writers in the English language, dubbed "the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation" by The Guardian. In this brilliantly conceived new novel Self turns his forensic eye and technicolor imagination to the troubled life of his mother, Elaine. Standing by the mailbox outside 1100 Hemlock Street in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her husband and child inside her house and wonders: is this ... it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that places her marriage to an Ivy League academic and former Communist Party member in peril. Based on the intimate diaries Self's mother kept for over forty years, Elaine is a writer's attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm: a parent's interior life prior to his own existence. Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction, Elaine shows Will Self working in an exciting new dimension, employing his stylistic talents to tremendous effect.
"A shattering portrait of a woman trapped by her domestic responsibilities and lingering 'postpartum neurosis' ... Self pulls off a painfully authentic depiction of Elaine's interior life, doing justice to her fierce anger and sexual desire along with her fears and humiliations. This is a tour de force." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"The provocative British novelist imagines his mother's complex inner life...Self has long been an admirer of the modernists, and stylistically this novel strongly recalls Mrs. Dalloway...Its chief strength is as a showcase of a woman who's had it up to here with good manners...A striking study of a woman on the verge." —Kirkus Reviews
"A deft character study that balances social criticism with the strive toward personhood." —Booklist
This information about Elaine 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.
Will Self is the author of many novels and books of nonfiction, including Great Apes; How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year; The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Shark; Phone; the memoir Will; and the essay collection Why Read. He lives in South London.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
