A provocative, wildly funny, intellectually rigorous and engrossing novel, punctuated by Siri Hustvedt's own illustrations - a tour de force by one of America's most acclaimed and beloved writers.


Fresh from Minnesota and hungry for all New York has to offer, twenty-three-year-old S.H. embarks on a year that proves both exhilarating and frightening - from bruising encounters with men to the increasingly ominous monologues of the woman next door.

Forty years on, those pivotal months come back to vibrant life when S.H. discovers the notebook in which she recorded her adventures alongside drafts of a novel. Measuring what she remembers against what she wrote, she regards her younger self with curiosity and often amusement. Anger too, for how much has really changed in a world where the female presidential candidate is called an abomination?

A 62-year-old writer - initials S.H. - discovers the journal she wrote during her first year in New York in 1978/9 and looks back on her 23-year-old self with amusement and anger. Reproducing extracts from it, which include parts of the novel she'd set herself 12 months to write about a teenage boy obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, she relives an exhilarating, eventful and often frightening year.

Then she was fresh from Minnesota, poor, innocent and hungry for all the city could offer - new friends, books, sex, poetry, ideas, LIFE! She does eventually make friends, but her experiences with men go from the disappointing to far worse. And from the outset she is caught up in a mystery: her neighbour chants bizarre things through the paper-thin walls of her apartment, with references to the murder of a young girl. S.H. becomes fixated on discovering the truth about the woman next door.

Now, our heroine can see that both she and her neighbour were victims of their era, when women were second-class citizens. But, if she considers the recent presidential election - 'I hear the roaring spleen of the white crowd as they spit and scream at the woman. The abomination. Cast her out'. - how much has fundamentally changed?

There is power here, fearsome and electric, bursting with rage at the patriarchy