Wifehouse : A captivating, sharply resonant novel about a mother who chooses to leave

<p>"<i>Je suis femme maison.</i>"<br>"You are a wifehouse? Oh, a housewife. <i>Je suis une femme au foyer.</i>"<br>"Wow, that actually sounds worse in French. Let's go with <i>je suis mère</i>."<br><i>He is drenched in youth, this young man,</i> she thinks. <i>He is soaked in all its possibilities.</i><br><br>Annie and Hector have been hosting family friends in the guest house of their Connecticut home for many months. As a thank you, Annie is gifted French lessons with a twenty-six-year-old local French tutor, Thierry. Hector, an actor, goes to Argentina to film on location, leaving Annie to single-parent their two kids. As life and the lessons progress, she finds herself unexpectedly vulnerable to the charms of a man closer in age to her teenage daughter than to her own. A new life for Annie emerges, one she could never have foreseen.<br><br><b>Bookended by two Christmas lunches and told over the course of one year through the shifting perspectives of wife, husband, lover, best friend and children, Walger paints a contradictory, nuanced portrait of a woman who walks away from every role that tradition and society have expected of her.</b></p>