Elaine Audiobook

The Bookershortlisted author of Umbrella writes his most American novel yeta brilliant portrait of a 1950s housewife based on the life of the authors mother and an exploration of sexual freedom and sublimated desireWILL SELF is one of the most inimitable contemporary writers in the English language dubbed the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation by The Guardian In this brilliantly conceived new novel Self turns his forensic eye and technicolor imagination to the troubled life of his mother Elaine Standing by the mailbox outside 1100 Hemlock Street in Ithaca New York Elaine thinks of her husband and child inside her house and wonders is this it As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America she undertakes a disastrous affair that places her marriage to an Ivy League academic and former Communist Party member in peril Based on the intimate diaries Selfs mother kept for over forty years Elaine is a writers attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm a parents interior life prior to his own existence Perhaps the first work of autooedipal fiction Elaine shows Will Self working in an exciting new dimension employing his stylistic talents to tremendous effect