The author of the critically acclaimed Schooling returns with a darkly comic novel about a mentally unpredictable woman intent on giving a young boy a proper education.

After leaving her husband and their suffocating marriage for a new lover in Rome, the narrator of Heather McGowan’s Duchess of Nothing has her freedom, but is still trapped by the routine of life and haunted by her past. Even worse, her lover, Edmund, is just as self-absorbed and remote as her former husband. Her one source of entertainment is Edmund’s seven-year-old brother, a curious, precocious, and defiant child who becomes her responsibility during her lover’s long absences. Spending their days together, they wander the city, simultaneously repelled by and drawn to each other as she teaches him important lessons he would otherwise never learn in school, such as “marriage is a tomb” and being an expert liar is key to getting ahead in the world. But when Edmund abandons them altogether, the amusing relationship between the narrator and her charge suddenly becomes a necessity, and she realizes how much she has come to depend on the boy.

Clever, wry, and acutely aware of her own precarious grasp on the world around her, the narrator of McGowan’s pitch-perfect novel speaks with a cutting honesty and a hilarious, twisted logic that keeps us riveted to the page.

Starred Review. McGowan's maverick follow-up to her debut, Schooling (2001), stars a 30-ish divorced American woman who, it is implied, has the lithe frame, iconic features and sophisticated trashiness of Holly Golightly. Too smart for her own good and lacking Holly's ambition or drive, the nameless narrator is living in Rome with young, faceless lover Edmund?and caring for Edmund's seven-year-old half-brother. Edmund is described mostly in terms of the beauty of his back, about which the narrator is careful to instruct "Edmund's brother" (aka "the boy") lest he get duped into loving an unworthy object (as she has). The boy's "education" (she forbids him to go to school) is in fact her preoccupation, allowing McGowan to give the woman's autodidactic rants (on love) free rein. When Edmund abruptly leaves the odd menage, the woman and the boy run out of money, get increasingly desperate and contemplate ways of finding Edmund that won't make them lose face. The woman's absolute devotion to tiny matters of style and comportment, and her resolute obliviousness to the ridiculously mannered, bafflingly anachronistic figure she cuts, is a lode McGowan mines with relish as she slowly chips away at the woman's love for the boy. Weeks after finishing this singular, pointedly frustrating novel, readers will find that nameless woman's mind still moving restlessly within them. (Mar. 28) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

"'When I was a girl I attended a prison of chalkboards. I roamed those halls filled with death, I watched old people robbing the brains of children,' says the unnamed narrator in Heather McGowan's wonderfully idiosyncratic 'Duchess of Nothing.' The narrator has left her rich Bavarian husband and their tomblike marriage for Edmund, a lover with an apartment in Rome. She spends her days taking care of... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) his 7-year-old brother, imparting to him the riches of her own life experience, which is a grim undertaking because she is a grim woman, 'a hard woman' who has 'never baked a pie for anyone.' Nothing clenches the speaker's heart 'with an icy hand as firmly as the appearance of normalcy,' but it is also normalcy she craves. She would like to prove that she is a normal, pie-baking woman, but there are too many obstacles. Where to find a recipe? Can the Italian shopkeepers be trusted to give a foreigner the right ingredients? McGowan's narrator simply cannot do wife, nor can she do mother, but she deeply loves the child in her care.

The phrase 'Duchess of Nothing' comes from a Sylvia Plath poem about a dissolving marriage, and like Plath, McGowan is lyrical and precise, ironic and mysterious. Things happen within McGowan's story that cannot be explained, though they can be deeply satisfying to the reader. Like Plath's only novel, 'The Bell Jar,' 'Duchess of Nothing' is about a breakdown. A beautiful city and a hopeful romance are quickly supplanted by the shock of adult terrors. What are these adult terrors, exactly? McGowan doesn't answer, nor does she employ any chick-lit formula to solve her protagonist's conundrum. Sexual love, motherhood, expensive sunglasses cannot lift a woman who yearns for what is no longer attainable: that uncomplicated time in her life when, she says, 'I had neither Edmund nor a husband, but was simply myself.'

Next to this brooding, existential novel, 'A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity,' by Kathleen Giles Seidel, is a warm, sudsy bath of social comedy. It tells the story of Lydia Meadows, a suburban stay-at-home mom, whose life is thrown into turmoil when her daughter, Erin, falls out with her sixth-grade clique. Erin is being replaced by the new kid in town, who has a 'relentless pursuit of popularity,' a girl so twisted that she will accuse the headmaster of sexual abuse just to get attention.

'A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity' is a book of subplots that are easily resolved and replaced by other subplots. The sexual abuse scandal is replaced by the drama of the Spring Fair; before the Spring Fair, Lydia suffers the crisis of Curriculum Night. It's not that the rise and fall of a PTA mother has no inherent comic drama, but Seidel can't seem to go beneath the surface of the situations she has created. In one of the book's more poignant scenes, Lydia leaves the familiarity of her ensconced life to visit her husband, a trial lawyer on location in Texas. Upon arrival, she surprises him with a sex act. No sooner is that done than Seidel is describing the decor of the hotel room in all its graphic detail. Furniture springs to life, but characters never do. The word 'bitch' is employed so often that the book, which promises to be a witty and compassionate novel of manners, a la Jane Austen, sometimes feels like a women-hating sitcom. Seidel doesn't seem to have the insight to make the dance of exclusion performed by girls and their mothers amount to more than one woman's narcissistic injury — nor does she seem to have the biting humor it would take to turn that experience into 'Mean Girls' for the over-40 set." Reviewed by Debra Weinstein, who is the author of "Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z", Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"If Molly Bloom could speak again, if Molloy could write to us from Rome, we would have something as bewitching as Duchess of Nothing, where Heather McGowan once again reclaims wit, philosophy and beauty as among the birthrights of great fiction." Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli

"Heather McGowan is the most elegant, arresting and lucid prose stylist I have encountered in years." Rick Moody

"A truly original premise, artfully developed into a memorable and perversely entertaining comic horror story." Kirkus Reviews