of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page. With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art. Well worth the wait, it’s packed with Offill’s brilliant observations of everyday life and. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. of Speculation is her second novel and her first since she became a mother a decade ago.

of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply 'the wife,' once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept.

It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all. Jenny Offills heroine, referred to in these pages as simply 'the wife,' once exchanged love letters with her husband, postmarked Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage.

Offill dept of speculation