The Other Wife

More about the book

'Extraordinary. A story about belonging in liminal spaces, and longing for things seemingly just out of reach. A searing, beautiful book.' Kiley Reid, author of Such a Fun Age Susan 'Zuzu' Braeburn is almost forty. She has the life she's always dreamed of - a beautiful house, a child, a successful partner. But something between her and her wife has been off for a long time, and she can't help but wonder if she's chosen wrong at every turn. Choosing to live with her white mother over her Black father after their divorce, choosing to become a lawyer rather than an artist and, most importantly, choosing to marry Agnes despite her unrequited feelings for her male best friend Cash. When an unexpected loss takes her back to her hometown, over a single wintery weekend, the 'what-ifs' in her mind become too loud to ignore. Zuzu grapples with the knowledge that she doesn't have infinite time to make changes in her life, and that sometimes it's too late to go back. A bold and bracing debut about race and class, love, nostalgia and mid-life reckoning . . . this is the moment at which we have to learn to live with the life we've chosen.