The Mere Wife

Author:   Maria Dahvana Headley
Publisher:   Scribe Publications
ISBN:  

9781925713459


Pages:   320
Publication Date:   30 July 2018
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
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The Mere Wife


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Overview

New York Times bestselling author Maria Dahvana Headley's fierce, feminist retelling of the classic tale of Beowulf. To those who live there, Herot Hall is a paradise. With picket fences, gabled buildings, and wildflowers that seed themselves in ordered rows, the suburb is a self-sustaining community, enclosed and secure. But to those who live secretly along its periphery, Herot Hall is a fortress guarded by an intense network of gates, surveillance cameras, and motion-activated lights. Dylan and Gren live on opposite sides of the perimeter, neither boy aware of the barriers erected to keep them apart. For Dylan and his mother, Willa, life moves at a charmingly slow pace. They flit between mothers' groups, playdates, cocktail hours, and dinner parties. Gren lives with his mother, Dana, just outside the limits of Herot Hall. A former soldier, Dana didn't want Gren, didn't plan Gren, and doesn't know how she got Gren. But now that she has him, she's determined to protect him from a world that sees him only as a monster. When Gren crosses the border into Herot Hall and runs off with Dylan, he sets up a collision between Dana's and Willa's worlds that echoes the Beowulf story - and gives sharp, startling currency to the ancient epic poem. ' A smart, tough modern flip of Beowulf.' -Margaret Atwood 'Her prose is an exhilarating mixture of darkness and fire, striking the perfect balance between sparse and startlingly vivid ... There's real heart in The Mere Wife; even in its most shocking, bloody moments, it's ultimately the moving story of one woman's desire to protect her child, and of that child's yearning for connection ... But its roots are coiled deep in the old earth and the dark water, the place that nightmares come from, and dreams too.' -The Irish Times 'The most surprising novel I've read this year ... Headley is the most fearsome warrior here, lunging and pivoting between ancient and modern realms, skewering class prejudices, defending the helpless and venturing into the dark crevices of our shameful fears. Someday The Mere Wife may take its place alongside such feminist classics as The Wide Sargasso Sea because in its own wicked and wickedly funny way it's just as insightful about how we make and kill our monsters.' -The Washington Post

Full Product Details

Author:   Maria Dahvana Headley
Publisher:   Scribe Publications
Imprint:   Scribe Publications
ISBN:  

9781925713459


ISBN 10:   1925713458
Pages:   320
Publication Date:   30 July 2018
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
We have confirmation that this item is in stock with the supplier. It will be ordered in for you and dispatched immediately.

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Reviews

`Maria Dahvana Headley translates the excesses of contemporary life into the gloriously mythic. This is not just an old story in new clothes: this is a consciousness-altering mindtrip of a book.' - Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble `The Mere Wife is a work of magic. A wild adventure, a celebration of monsters, myths, and the power of mother-love. Imagine a writer so bold, so ambitious, so about it that she challenges Beowulf to arm wrestle. That writer is Maria Dahvana Headley and let me tell you something, she is here to win.' - Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling `Maria Dahvana Headley is a gift, a genius, and an absolute wonder; I would follow her anywhere.' - Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties `With a sharp eye and a deft flourish, Maria Dahvana Headley reimagines one of our oldest stories to give us a chilling, elemental vision of our latest selves. The Mere Wife is a bold, stunning riptide of a book.' - Tea Obreht, author of The Tiger's Wife `Maria Dahvana Headley writes - with crackling headlong sentences that range among old plots and news observations - about a world that earlier today seemed too familiar. Master storyteller, brilliant stylist, a writer with this sort of command of language is a delight to read. Here's a book to call up an old story in the newest possible way.' - Samuel R Delany, author of Dhalgren and Dark Reflections `The Mere Wife is an astonishing reinterpretation of Beowulf: Beowulf in suburbia - epic, operatic, and razor-sharp, a story not of a thick-thewed thegn, but of women at war, as wives and warriors, mothers and matriarchs. Their chosen weapons are as likely to be swords as public relations and they wield both fearlessly. They rule, they fight.' - Nicola Griffith, author of Hild Praise for Maria Dahvana Headley : `Maria Dahvana Headley is a firecracker: she's whip-smart with a heart, and she writes like a dream.' - Neil Gaiman


Author Information

Maria Dahvana Headley is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and editor, most recently of the novels Magonia, Aerie, and Queen of Kings and the memoir The Year of Yes. With Kat Howard she is the co-author of The End of the Sentence, and with Neil Gaiman she is the coeditor of Unnatural Creatures. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, and her work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony and by Arte Studio Ginestrelle, where the first draft of this book was written. She was raised with a wolf and a pack of sled dogs in the high desert of rural Idaho and now lives in Brooklyn.

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