Doctor's Daughter (06 Edition)

In her first work of fiction in more than a decade, award-winning novelist Hilma Wolitzer brilliantly renders the intimate details of ordinary life and exposes a host of hidden truths. The Doctors Daughter is a haunting portrait of a woman coming to terms with her family history and the fallibility of memory.

One morning, Alice Brill awakes with a sudden awareness that something is wrong. Theres a hollowness in her chest, and a sensation of dread that she cant identify or shake. Was it something shes done, or forgotten to do? As she scours her mind for the source of her unease, she confronts an array of disturbing possibilities.

First, there is her marriage, a once vibrant relationship that now languishes stasis. Then theres her idle, misdirected younger son, who always needs bailing out of some difficulty. Or perhaps Alices trepidation is caused by the loss of her career as an editor at a large publishing house, and the new path shes paved for herself as a freelance book doctor. Or it might be the real doctor in her life: her father. Formerly one of New Yorks top surgeons, he now rests in a nursing home, his mind gripped by dementia. And the Eden that was Alices childhood–the material benefits and reflected glory of being a successful doctors daughter, the romance of her parents famously perfect marriage–makes her own domestic life seem fatally flawed.

While struggling to find the root of her restlessness, Alice is buoyed by her discovery of a talented new writer, a man who works by day as a machinist in Michigan. Soon their interactions and feelings intensify, and Alice realizes that the mystery shes been trying to solve lies not in the present, as she had assumed, but in the past–and in the secrets of a marriage that was never as perfect as it appeared.

Like the best works of Anne Tyler, Sue Miller, and Gail Godwin, The Doctors Daughter is private yet universal, luminous and revelatory–and marks the reemergence of a singular talent in American writing.

From the Hardcover edition.

Hilma Wolitzer is the author of several novels, including Hearts, Ending, and Tunnel of Love, as well as the nonfiction book The Company of Writers. She is a recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa, New York University, and Columbia University. Hilma Wolitzer lives in New York City.

From the Hardcover edition.