The Other Wife: A bold debut novel about race and class, love and nostalgia and learning to live with the life we have chosen
Jackie Thomas-Kennedy
Jul 2025 · Random House
Ebook
304
Pages
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About this ebook
'Extraordinary. A story about belonging in liminal spaces, and longing for things seemingly just out of reach. A searing, beautiful book.' Kiley Reid, author of Such a Fun Age
Susan ‘Zuzu’ Braeburn is almost forty. She has the life she’s always dreamed of – a beautiful house, a child, a successful partner. But something between her and Agnes has been off for a long time, and she can’t help but wonder ‘what if’.
What if she had chosen to live with her father instead of her mother after their divorce? To pursue art over law? And, most importantly, to pursue her feelings for her male best friend from college, Cash, instead of marrying Agnes?
When an unexpected loss takes her back to her hometown, over a single wintery weekend, the questions in Zuzu’s mind become too loud to ignore. She grapples with the choices she’s made and the knowledge that she doesn’t have infinite time to make changes in her life.
The Other Wife speaks to unfulfilled desires and the euphoric nostalgia that’s particular to the beginning of middle age; it is heartfelt and daring in its reckoning with the quest for joy.
Susan ‘Zuzu’ Braeburn is almost forty. She has the life she’s always dreamed of – a beautiful house, a child, a successful partner. But something between her and Agnes has been off for a long time, and she can’t help but wonder ‘what if’.
What if she had chosen to live with her father instead of her mother after their divorce? To pursue art over law? And, most importantly, to pursue her feelings for her male best friend from college, Cash, instead of marrying Agnes?
When an unexpected loss takes her back to her hometown, over a single wintery weekend, the questions in Zuzu’s mind become too loud to ignore. She grapples with the choices she’s made and the knowledge that she doesn’t have infinite time to make changes in her life.
The Other Wife speaks to unfulfilled desires and the euphoric nostalgia that’s particular to the beginning of middle age; it is heartfelt and daring in its reckoning with the quest for joy.
About the author
Jackie Thomas-Kennedy has been awarded a highly prestigious Stegner Fellowship and two MacDowell fellowships for her writing, as well as fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Yaddo. She is the winner of the 2019 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. Her work has been recorded for NPR’s Selected Shorts, and her stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, One Story, and Electric Literature, amongst others.
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