FROM THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF WHAT I LOVED 'Few contemporary writers are as satisfying and stimulating to read as Siri Hustvedt' Washington Post 'A 21st-century Virginia Woolf' Literary Review A provocative, wildly funny, intellectually rigorous and engrossing novel, punctuated by Siri Hustvedt's own illustrations - a tour de force by one of America's most acclaimed and beloved writers. Fresh from Minnesota and hungry for all New York has to offer, twenty-three-year-old S.H. embarks on a year that proves both exhilarating and frightening - from bruising encounters with men to the increasingly ominous monologues of the woman next door. Forty years on, those pivotal months come back to vibrant life when S.H. discovers the notebook in which she recorded her adventures alongside drafts of a novel. Measuring what she remembers against what she wrote, she regards her younger self with curiosity and often amusement. Anger too, for how much has really changed in a world where the female presidential candidate is called an abomination? 'Provocative and mysterious . . . comic and sensual' Daily Mail PRAISE FOR SIRI HUSTVEDT: 'Hustvedt is that rare artist, a writer of high intelligence, profound sensuality and a less easily definable capacity for which the only word I can find is wisdom' Salman Rushdie 'One of our finest novelists' Oliver Sacks 'Reading a Hustvedt novel is like consuming the best of David Lynch' Financial Times