Excerpt from Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Or cuckold's horns.

"What's the difference between a need and a want?"

"A want is desirable, though not essential. A need is something without which you cannot survive." The Doktor added, "If you cannot live without something, you won't."

Anything at all? Like Doktor Messerli, Archie spoke a magnificently accented English intoned not by the shape-­shifting consonants of High Alemannic, but by words that both roiled and wrenched open. Here an undulant r, there a queue of vowels rammed into one another like a smithy's bellows pressed hotly closed. Anna drew herself to men who spoke with accents. It was the lilt of Bruno's nonnative English that she let slide its thumb, its tongue into the waistband of her panties on their very first date (that, and the Williamsbirnen Schnaps, the pear tinctured eau-­de-­vie they drank themselves stupid with). In her youth Anna dreamed soft, damp dreams of the men she imagined she would one day love, men who would one day love her. She gave them proper names but indistinct, foreign faces: Michel, the French sculptor with long, clay-­caked fingers; Dmitri, the verger of an Orthodox church whose skin smelled of camphor, of rockrose, of sandalwood resin and myrrh; Guillermo, her lover with matador hands. They were phantom men, girlhood ideations. But she mounted an entire international army of them.

It was the Swiss one she married.

If you cannot live without something, you won't.

Despite Doktor Messerli's suggestion that she enroll in these classes, Anna did know an elementary level of German. She got around. But hers was a German remarkable only in how badly it was cultivated and by the herculean effort she had to summon in order to speak it. For nine years, though, she'd managed with rudimentary competence. Anna had purchased stamps from the woman at the post office, consulted in semi-­specifics with pediatricians and pharmacists, described the haircuts she desired to stylists, haggled prices at flea markets, made brief chitchat with neighbors, and indulged a pair of affable though persistent Zeugen Jehovas who, each month, arrived on her doorstep with a German-­language copy of The Watchtower. Anna had also, though with less frequency, given directions to strangers, adapted recipes from cooking programs, taken notes when the chimney sweep detailed structural hazards of loose mortar joints and blocked flues, and extracted herself from citations when, upon the conductor's request, she could not produce her rail pass for validation.

Excerpted from Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum. Copyright © 2015 by Jill Alexander Essbaum. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.