American Housewife

Meet the women of American Housewife… They smoke their eyes and paint their lips. They channel Beyoncé while doing household chores. They drown their sorrows with Chanel No. 5 and host book clubs where chardonnay trumps Charles Dickens. They redecorate. And they are quietly capable of kidnapping, breaking and entering, and murder. These women know the rules of a well-lived life: replace your tights every winter, listen to erotic audio books while you scrub the bathroom floor, serve what you want to eat at your dinner parties, and accept it: you’re too old to have more than one drink and sleep through the night. Vicious, fresh and darkly hilarious, American Housewife is a collection of stories for anyone who has ever wondered what really goes on behind the façades of the housewives of America… ‘Surreal tales of American weirdness, with details that ring all too true. Ouch, I say at times. At other times, yikes’ Margaret Atwood, Guardian Best Books of the Year ‘I tore through it. It’s MAD. Utterly mad but brilliant’ Louise O’Neill ‘Each perfect little story is a fine chocolate, laced with arsenic. Wickedly funny, painfully truthful’ Erin Kelly ‘After reading American Housewife, I'm convinced Dorothy Parker faked her death and is alive and writing under the pen name “Helen Ellis”. Witty, lacerating, and sometimes touching, this book is a salty assortment of surprises, each more delicious than the last. Savor it with a dry martini’ Deanna Raybourn