Wellness

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OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • From the New York Times bestselling author of The Nix, a witty and poignant new novel about modern marriage, the often baffling pursuit of health and happiness, and the stories that bind us together

“A hilarious and moving exploration of a modern marriage that astounds in its breadth and intimacy.” —Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the nineties, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago’s thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years, and now they’re grappling with the routines of married life, the challenges of parenting, and the indignities of aging—not to mention cults of positive thinking, polyamorous would-be suitors, Facebook trolls, NIMBY protests, and something called Love Potion Number Nine.

For the first time, Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize each other, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to painful childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process, they have to undertake separate personal excavations or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.

Moving from the gritty nineties Chicago art scene to a suburbia of detox diets and home-renovation hysteria, Wellness mines the absurdities of technology and modern love to reveal profound, startling truths about intimacy and connection. In this follow-up to Hill’s electric debut, Wellness reimagines the love story with a healthy dose of insight, irony, and heart.”Hill blends a family chronicle with cultural critique in his expansive and surprisingly tender latest . . . This stunning novel of ideas never loses sight of its humanity.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Warmhearted . . . A bittersweet novel of love gained, lost, and regained over the course of decades.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Hill is an immensely talented writer; he has a gift for prose that’s elegant but unshowy, and his dialogue consistently rings true-to-life. . . . It’s a monumental achievement: a masterpiece by an author who has . . . become indispensable.” —NPR

“The story is so immersive that I felt like a voyeur spying on the most personal moments of two strangers. . . . Wellness is full of Hill’s subtle and sarcastic humor, balanced by moments of true emotion.” —Huffington Post

“Future historians, read this book. Wellness [is] a crackling, witty chronicle of the world of the urban creative classes from the 1990s to now.” —The Times (UK)

“Wellness is a novel to lose yourself in. The characters are authentic and interesting, the set-pieces exhilarating and the reader cares about whether Jack and Elizabeth will be able to fulfil the potential of their early romantic promise. . . . A hugely entertaining voice in American fiction.” —Irish Times 

“A hilarious and moving exploration of a modern marriage that astounds in its breadth and intimacy.” —Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half

“Wellness is such a beautiful, sometimes sad, sometimes satirical but most of all honest book about the many people a person becomes—the way a life, in time, inevitably upends itself. A love story of dislodged chronology, Nathan Hill’s brilliant interrogation of a single relationship spiderwebs out into almost every facet of our contemporary anxieties. Few writers working today have dissected, with such a sharp scalpel, the fundamental paradox of modern American life: this hopelessly broken need to fix what may not need fixing, to reach with utter desperation for a version of better that may not be better at all. Read Wellness with caution: it lays so much of our little self-deceptions bare.” —Omar El Akkad, author of American War

“Nathan Hill has synthesized about a hundred years of that distinctly American delusion called self-improvement, and Wellness is the whip smart and gently comic result. Epic in scope, domestic in scale, it’s a book that defies anyone to read it and willingly pick up a dumbbell or worry about counting steps ever again. Hill has released you, America, and his book will leave you not only fortified but amazed.”    —Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End

“Wellness is one of the funniest, saddest, smartest novels I’ve ever read. In his portrait of one foundering marriage, Nathan Hill has encapsulated the pathologies and possibilities of our troubled era. With his razor-sharp satire and heartbreaking pathos, his stylistic virtuosity and human warmth, Hill has written both a propulsive page-turner and an artistic achievement of the highest order. I didn’t think I could love a book more than The Nix until I read Wellness. It’s a flat-out masterpiece.”      —Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“Ambitious, deeply engrossing, whip-smart and ultimately heartbreaking, Nathan Hill’s Wellness is all this and much more.” —Richard Russo, author of the North Bath TrilogyNATHAN HILL’s bestselling debut novel, The Nix, was named the #1 book of 2016 by Entertainment Weekly and one of the year’s best books by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Slate and many others. It was the winner of the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction from the Los Angeles Times and was published worldwide in more than two dozen languages. A native Iowan, Hill lives with his wife in Naples, Florida.US

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