One of Oprah Magazine's Most Anticipated Books of 2021! 'Genre-bending and darkly comic, Grushin's fourth novel is a weird and wonderful triumph.'
And they lived happily ever after . . . didn't they?
Cinderella married the man of her dreams - the perfect ending she deserved after diligently following all the fairy-tale rules. Yet now, two children and thirteen-and-a-half years later, things have gone badly wrong.
One night, she sneaks out of the palace to get help from the Witch who, for a price, offers love potions to disgruntled housewives. But as the old hag flings the last ingredients into the cauldron, Cinderella doesn't ask for a love spell to win back her Prince Charming.
Instead, she wants him dead.
Endlessly surprising and wildly inventive, The Charmed Wife is a sophisticated literary fairy tale for the twenty-first century that weaves together time and place, fantasy and reality, to conjure a world unlike any other. Nothing in it is quite what it seems, and the twists and turns of its magical, dark, swiftly shifting paths take us deep into the heart of romance, marriage and the very nature of storytelling.
'Dark and dreamy. Inside the plot, magic comes and goes. But inside the reader, it's all magic - all of us happily caught in Grushin's hypnotic spell.' - Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and The Jane Austen Book Club
'Fall under its charms, I dare you' - Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked
Genre: Literary Fiction
And they lived happily ever after . . . didn't they?
Cinderella married the man of her dreams - the perfect ending she deserved after diligently following all the fairy-tale rules. Yet now, two children and thirteen-and-a-half years later, things have gone badly wrong.
One night, she sneaks out of the palace to get help from the Witch who, for a price, offers love potions to disgruntled housewives. But as the old hag flings the last ingredients into the cauldron, Cinderella doesn't ask for a love spell to win back her Prince Charming.
Instead, she wants him dead.
Endlessly surprising and wildly inventive, The Charmed Wife is a sophisticated literary fairy tale for the twenty-first century that weaves together time and place, fantasy and reality, to conjure a world unlike any other. Nothing in it is quite what it seems, and the twists and turns of its magical, dark, swiftly shifting paths take us deep into the heart of romance, marriage and the very nature of storytelling.
'Dark and dreamy. Inside the plot, magic comes and goes. But inside the reader, it's all magic - all of us happily caught in Grushin's hypnotic spell.' - Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and The Jane Austen Book Club
'Fall under its charms, I dare you' - Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"The Charmed Wife is a thought-provoking, wickedly clever, and beautifully written fairy tale character study that enchants at every turn. Olga Grushin dissects fairy tales, marriage, and the messy human heart with a pen as sharp as any scalpel." - Melissa Bashardoust
"With the publication of her first novel, Grushin instantly became one of my favorite writers. She touches the borders of myth and fairytale in everything she does, but never so explicitly as here, in this dark and dreamy retelling of Cinderella. Inside the plot, magic comes and goes. But inside the reader, it's all magic, all of us happily caught in Grushin's hypnotic spell." - Karen Joy Fowler
"The comedy is devastating in this autopsy of a marriage that dies of 'happily ever after' syndrome. Seldom has such emotional realism been spied in the precincts of wild magic. This alumna of the Cinderella marriage is overwhelmed, over-enchanted, and so over it. Fall under its charms, I dare you." - Gregory Maguire
"With the publication of her first novel, Grushin instantly became one of my favorite writers. She touches the borders of myth and fairytale in everything she does, but never so explicitly as here, in this dark and dreamy retelling of Cinderella. Inside the plot, magic comes and goes. But inside the reader, it's all magic, all of us happily caught in Grushin's hypnotic spell." - Karen Joy Fowler
"The comedy is devastating in this autopsy of a marriage that dies of 'happily ever after' syndrome. Seldom has such emotional realism been spied in the precincts of wild magic. This alumna of the Cinderella marriage is overwhelmed, over-enchanted, and so over it. Fall under its charms, I dare you." - Gregory Maguire
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