Adora Hazzard, a Stoic philosopher, has built a calm life on desiring only what she already has. Maria Semple's novel puts a handsome stranger in her path and lets the calm come apart.

Readical Key Points

• An Oprah's Book Club pick and an instant New York Times bestseller, according to the publisher
• Starred review from Booklist; also reviewed in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews
• A comic literary novel set on New York's Upper West Side, with romance, art-world intrigue and Stoic philosophy
• Hardcover, 384 pages, from G.P. Putnam's Sons

Adora is divorced, with a teenage daughter, a job as moral tutor to twin boys from an old-money family, and a circle of like-minded women she calls her coven, who live on her floor of the Ansonia. A chance meeting upends that life with black-market art deals and international intrigue, while a past she worked hard to bury pushes its way back into her present.

Semple's earlier novels include Where'd You Go, Bernadette. This one is humorous literary fiction with a romance and an intrigue plot, following a woman in midlife whose settled philosophy is put to the test. One chance meeting is enough to tip a carefully arranged life off its axis.

About the Author

Maria Semple is the bestselling author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette, Today Will Be Different and This One Is Mine, and her novels have appeared in forty languages. She wrote for television before turning to fiction.

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