A “furious and addictive new novel” (The New York Times) about mothers and daughters, and one woman's midlife reckoning as she flees her suburban life.
 
Samantha Raymond's life has begun to come apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and at 52 she finds herself staring into "the Mids" --- that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood, mortality and, in this case, the state of our unraveling nation.

When she falls in love with a beautiful, decrepit house in a hardscrabble neighborhood in Syracuse, she buys it on a whim and flees her suburban life --- and her family --- as she grapples with how to be a wife, a mother and a daughter in a country that is coming apart at the seams.

Dana Spiotta's WAYWARD is a stunning novel about aging, the female body and female complexity in contemporary America. Probing and provocative, brainy and sensual, it is a testament to our weird times, to reforms and resistance and utopian wishes, and to the beauty of ruins.

Audiobook available, read by Susan Bennett