Books by Ayelet Waldman
Love and Other Impossible Pursuits
With wry candor and tender humor, acclaimed novelist Ayelet Waldman has crafted a strikingly beautiful novel for our time, tackling the absurdities of modern life and reminding us why we love some people no matter what.
For Emilia Greenleaf, life is by turns a comedy of errors and an emotional minefield. Yes, she’s a Harvard Law grad who married her soul mate. Yes, they live in elegant comfort on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But with her one-and-only, Jack, came a stepson—a know-it-all preschooler named William who has become her number one responsibility every Wednesday afternoon. With William, Emilia encounters a number of impossible pursuits—such as the pursuit of cab drivers who speed away when they see William’s industrial-strength car seat and the pursuit of lactose-free, strawberry-flavored, patisserie-quality cupcakes, despite the fact that William’s allergy is a figment of his over-protective mother’s imagination.
As much as Emilia wants to find common ground with William, she becomes completely preoccupied when she loses her newborn daughter. After this, the sight of any child brings her to tears, and Wednesdays with William are almost impossible. When his unceasing questions turn to the baby’s death, Emilia is at a total loss. Doesn’t anyone understand that self-pity is a full-time job? Ironically, it is only through her blundering attempts to bond with William that she finally heals herself and learns what family really means.
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Love and Other Impossible Pursuits
In this moving, wry, and candid novel, widely acclaimed novelist Ayelet Waldman takes us through one woman’s passage through love, loss, and the strange absurdities of modern life.Emilia Greenleaf believed that she had found her soulmate, the man she was meant to spend her life with. But life seems a lot less rosy when Emilia has to deal with the most neurotic and sheltered five-year-old in New York City: her new stepson William. Now Emilia finds herself trying to flag down taxis with a giant, industrial-strength car seat, looking for perfect, strawberry-flavored, lactose-free cupcakes, receiving corrections on her French pronunciation from her supercilious stepson – and attempting to find balance in a new family that’s both larger, and smaller, than she bargained for. In Love and Other Impossible Pursuits Ayelet Waldman has created a novel rich with humor and truth, perfectly characterizing one woman’s search for answers in a crazily uncertain world.
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Death Gets a Time-Out (A Mommy-Track Mystery)
Between juggling lunchboxes, piano lessons, and baby-sitters, public defender turned stay-at-home mom Juliet Applebaum promises to help her famous friend clear her brother's name of murder. But what will she do when she begins to suspect her friend may not be as innocent as she seems?
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Daughter's Keeper
How much would you sacrifice to save someone you love?
When Olivia, wild-haired and headstrong, makes a terrible mistake, she must turn to the person least likely to help―her mother, Elaine. Motherhood was a role that Elaine never embraced and her best never amounted to much. But now Olivia faces prosecution for a naïve connection to a drug deal and she needs Elaine more than ever. As the days count down and Olivia's future hangs in the balance, Elaine must decide just how much she is willing to give for a second chance with her daughter.
With Daughter's Keeper, Ayelet Waldman has crafted a redemptive journey at once highly emotional and unbearably suspenseful, as Olivia and Elaine's struggle builds to a beautiful, heart-wrenching climax. In this luminous, gripping novel, Waldman brings to life the tensions and the tenderness that forge the unshakeable bond between parent and child. Daughter's Keeper reveals the unlimited boundaries of forgiveness and the sacrifices we make for love.
"A powerhouse novel of complex emotions so compelling that when I finished the book, I started over again."―Amy Tan
"In Daughter's Keeper, Ayelet Waldman shows that the power of love, even when prickling with thorns, can ultimately provide what the criminal system cannot: a hard-fought, hard-won second chance."―Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil
"Waldman's passion and affection for her characters shine through."―Publishers Weekly
"Waldman has written Daughter's Keeper with enough intelligence, tenderness and craft to shape outrage into a story that is both moving and enthralling." ―Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and You Shall Know Our Velocity!
"Ayelet Waldman has brought the war on drugs home, and has shown us just how close to home it can come.…She looks past headlines and into the heart. What she finds there is hope for us all." ―Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina
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Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation
by Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman
A groundbreaking collection of essays by celebrated international writers bears witness to the human cost of fifty years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
In Kingdom of Olives and Ash, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, two of today's most renowned novelists and essayists, have teamed up with the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence—an organization comprised of former Israeli soldiers who served in the occupied territories and saw firsthand the injustice there—and a host of illustrious writers to tell the stories of the people on the ground in the contested territories.
Kingdom of Olives and Ash includes contributions from several of today’s most esteemed storytellers including: Colum McCann, Jacqueline Woodson, Colm Toibin, Geraldine Brooks, Dave Eggers, Hari Kunzru, Raja Shehadeh, Mario Vargas Llosa and Assaf Gavron, as well as from editors Chabon and Waldman. Through these incisive, perceptive, and poignant essays, readers will gain unique insight into the narratives behind the litany of grim destruction broadcasted nightly on the news, as well as deeper understanding of the conflict as experienced by the people who live in the occupied territories. Together, these stories stand witness to the human cost of the occupation.
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Red Hook Road
A rich and rewarding story of love, loss, and the power of family from the bestselling author of Bad Mother and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits.
In the aftermath of a devastating wedding day, two families, the Tetherlys and the Copakens, find their lives unraveled by unthinkable loss. Over the course of the next four summers in Red Hook, Maine, they struggle to bridge differences of class and background to honor the memory of the couple, Becca and John. As Waldman explores the unique and personal ways in which each character responds to the tragedy—from the budding romance between the two surviving children, Ruthie and Matt, to the struggling marriage between Iris, a high strung professor in New York, and her husband Daniel—she creates a powerful family portrait and a beautiful reminder of the joys of life.
Elegantly written and emotionally gripping, Red Hook Road affirms Waldman’s place among today’s most talented authors.
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A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life
The true story of how a renowned writer’s struggle with mood storms led her to try a remedy as drastic as it is forbidden: microdoses of LSD. Her revealing, fascinating journey provides a window into one family and the complex world of a once-infamous drug seen through new eyes.
When a small vial arrives in her mailbox from "Lewis Carroll," Ayelet Waldman is at a low point. Her moods have become intolerably severe; she has tried nearly every medication possible; her husband and children are suffering with her. So she opens the vial, places two drops on her tongue, and joins the ranks of an underground but increasingly vocal group of scientists and civilians successfully using therapeutic microdoses of LSD. As Waldman charts her experience over the course of a month--bursts of productivity, sleepless nights, a newfound sense of equanimity--she also explores the history and mythology of LSD, the cutting-edge research into the drug, and the byzantine policies that control it. Drawing on her experience as a federal public defender, and as the mother of teenagers, and her research into the therapeutic value of psychedelics, Waldman has produced a book that is eye-opening, often hilarious, and utterly enthralling.
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A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life
“Relentlessly honest and surprisingly funny.” – The Washington Post
“Genuinely brave and human.” —The New York Times
“Wildly brilliant.” —Elle
The true story of how a renowned writer’s struggle with mood storms led her to try a remedy as drastic as it is forbidden: microdoses of LSD. Her fascinating journey provides a window into one family and the complex world of a once-infamous drug seen through new eyes.
When a small vial arrives in her mailbox from "Lewis Carroll," Ayelet Waldman is ready to try anything. Her depression has become intolerable, severe and unmanageable; medication has failed to make a difference. Married with four children and a robust career, she "should" be happy, but instead her family and her work are suffering at the mercy of her mood disorder. So she opens the vial, places two drops on her tongue, and becomes part of a burgeoning underground group of scientists and civilians successfully using therapeutic microdoses of LSD. As Waldman charts her experience over the course of a month, during which she achieved a newfound feeling of serenity, she also explores the history and mythology of LSD, the cutting-edge research into the drug, and the byzantine policies that control it. Drawing on her experience as a federal public defender, and as the mother of teenagers, and her research into the therapeutic value of psychedelics, Waldman has produced a book that is candid, revealing and completely enthralling.
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Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace
In the tradition of recent hits like The Bitch in the House and Perfect Madness comes a hilarious and controversial book that every woman will have an opinion about, written by America’s most outrageous writer.
In our mothers’ day there were good mothers, neglectful mothers, and occasionally great mothers.
Today we have only Bad Mothers.
If you work, you’re neglectful; if you stay home, you’re smothering. If you discipline, you’re buying them a spot on the shrink’s couch; if you let them run wild, they will be into drugs by seventh grade. If you buy organic, you’re spending their college fund; if you don’t, you’re risking all sorts of allergies and illnesses.
Is it any wonder so many women refer to themselves at one time or another as “a bad mother”? Ayelet Waldman says it’s time for women to get over it and get on with it, in a book that is sure to spark the same level of controversy as her now legendary Modern Love piece, in which she confessed to loving her husband more than her children.
Covering topics as diverse as the hysteria of competitive parenting (Whose toddler can recite the planets in order from the sun?), the relentless pursuits of the Bad Mother police, balancing the work-family dynamic, and the bane of every mother’s existence (homework, that is), Bad Mother illuminates the anxieties that riddle motherhood today, while providing women with the encouragement they need to give themselves a break.
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Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “hilarious, heartbreaking, and edgy” (Newsweek) memoir on modern motherhood.
In our mothers’ day there were good mothers, indifferent mothers, and occasionally, great mothers. Today we have only Bad Mothers: If you work, you’re neglectful; if you stay home, you’re smothering. If you discipline, you’re buying them a spot on the shrink’s couch; if you let them run wild, they will be into drugs by seventh grade. Is it any wonder so many women refer to themselves at one time or another as a “bad mother”?
Writing with remarkable candor, and dispensing much hilarious and helpful advice along the way—Is breast best? What should you do when your daughter dresses up as a “ho” for Halloween?—Ayelet Waldman says it's time for women to get over it and get on with it in this wry, unflinchingly honest, and always insightful memoir on motherhood in today's world.
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Red Hook Road: A Novel
As lyrical as a sonata, Ayelet Waldman’s follow-up novel to Love and Other Impossible Pursuits explores the aftermath of a family tragedy.
Set on the coast of Maine over the course of four summers, Red Hook Road tells the story of two families, the Tetherlys and the Copakens, and of the ways in which their lives are unraveled and stitched together by misfortune, by good intentions and failure, and by love and calamity.
A marriage collapses under the strain of a daughter’s death; two bereaved siblings find comfort in one another; and an adopted young girl breathes new life into her family with her prodigious talent for the violin. As she writes with obvious affection for these unforgettable characters, Ayelet Waldman skillfully interweaves life’s finer pleasures—music and literature—with the more mundane joys of living. Within these resonant pages, a vase filled with wildflowers or a cold beer on a hot summer day serve as constant reminders that it’s often the little things that make life so precious.
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Love and Treasure
A spellbinding new novel of contraband masterpieces, tragic love, and the unexpected legacies of forgotten crimes, Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Treasure weaves a tale around the fascinating, true history of the Hungarian Gold Train in the Second World War.
In 1945 on the outskirts of Salzburg, victorious American soldiers capture a train filled with unspeakable riches: piles of fine gold watches; mountains of fur coats; crates filled with wedding rings, silver picture frames, family heirlooms, and Shabbat candlesticks passed down through generations. Jack Wiseman, a tough, smart New York Jew, is the lieutenant charged with guarding this treasure—a responsibility that grows more complicated when he meets Ilona, a fierce, beautiful Hungarian who has lost everything in the ravages of the Holocaust. Seventy years later, amid the shadowy world of art dealers who profit off the sins of previous generations, Jack gives a necklace to his granddaughter, Natalie Stein, and charges her with searching for an unknown woman—a woman whose portrait and fate come to haunt Natalie, a woman whose secret may help Natalie to understand the guilt her grandfather will take to his grave and to find a way out of the mess she has made of her own life.
A story of brilliantly drawn characters—a suave and shady art historian, a delusive and infatuated Freudian, a family of singing circus dwarfs fallen into the clutches of Josef Mengele, and desperate lovers facing choices that will tear them apart—Love and Treasure is Ayelet Waldman’s finest novel to date: a sad, funny, richly detailed work that poses hard questions about the value of precious things in a time when life itself has no value, and about the slenderest of chains that can bind us to the griefs and passions of the past.
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Love and Treasure
A Washington Post Best Book of the Year
An Oprah.com Best Book of the Year
In 1945, on the outskirts of Salzburg, American soldiers discover a train filled with unspeakable riches: gold watches and wedding rings, picture frames and Shabbat candlesticks. Jack Wiseman is the lieutenant tasked with guarding this treasure in the chaotic aftermath of war—a responsibility that grows more complicated when he meets Ilona, a fierce, beautiful Hungarian woman who has lost everything in the ravages of the Holocaust.
Seventy years later, amid the shadowy world of art dealers who profit off the sins of previous generations, Jack gives a necklace to his granddaughter, Natalie, and charges her with returning it to its owner. And as Natalie searches for the woman whose portrait and unknown fate have come to haunt her, she will come to understand the secret her grandfather took to his grave.
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A Playdate with Death (A Mommy-Track Mystery)
Stay-at-home mother Juliet Applebaum, a former public defender, once again returns to the world of crime when she finds herself investigating the mysterious murder of her personal trainer.
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And Murder Makes Three (Mommy-track Mysteries)
NOW IN ONE VOLUME—THE FIRST THREE MOMMY-TRACK MYSTERIES
Nursery Crimes
Bored with playdates and trips to the park, Juliet Applebaum, a public defender turned stay-at-home mom, gets off the mommy track to hunt down the murderer of a preschool principal.
The Big Nap
When her infant son’s babysitter disappears, an exhausted Juliet and her over-tired kids travel to Brooklyn to find answers, justice, and maybe the chance to get a nice, long nap.
A Playdate with Death
Juliet is happy to be getting some kid-free time at the gym—until her peppy personal trainer dies under mysterious circumstances. Always up for a reason to get out of the house, Juliet jumps at the chance to investigate.
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Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women's Prisons (Voice of Witness)
“Essential reading” on some of the most egregious human rights violations within women’s prisons in the United States (Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black)
Here, in their own words, thirteen women recount their lives leading up to incarceration and their harrowing struggle for survival once insides. Among the narrators:
Theresa, who spent years believing her health and life were in danger, being aggressively treated with a variety of medications for a disease she never had. Only on her release did she discover that an incompetent prison medical bureaucracy had misdiagnosed her with HIV.
Anna, who repeatedly warned apathetic prison guards about a suicidal cellmate. When the woman killed herself, the guards punished Anna in an attempt to silence her and hide their own negligence.
Teri, who was sentenced to up to fifty years for aiding and abetting a robbery when she was only seventeen. A prison guard raped Teri, who was still a teenager, and the assaults continued for years with the complicity of other staff.
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Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women's Prisons (Voice of Witness)
“Essential reading” on some of the most egregious human rights violations within women’s prisons in the United States (Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black)
Here, in their own words, thirteen women recount their lives leading up to incarceration and their harrowing struggle for survival once insides. Among the narrators:
Theresa, who spent years believing her health and life were in danger, being aggressively treated with a variety of medications for a disease she never had. Only on her release did she discover that an incompetent prison medical bureaucracy had misdiagnosed her with HIV.
Anna, who repeatedly warned apathetic prison guards about a suicidal cellmate. When the woman killed herself, the guards punished Anna in an attempt to silence her and hide their own negligence.
Teri, who was sentenced to up to fifty years for aiding and abetting a robbery when she was only seventeen. A prison guard raped Teri, who was still a teenager, and the assaults continued for years with the complicity of other staff.
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A Perfect Hand A Novel
A richly drawn, captivating, and endlessly amusing novel of love and subterfuge between a lady’s maid and her clandestine lover, set in the country estates of nineteenth-century England.
Miss Alice Lockey, daughter of a tenant farmer, has by dint of hard work, innate intelligence, and a cunning ability to predict the moods of her betters, raised herself to the lofty status of lady’s maid at Alderwick Park. Though her mother has advised Alice to work only until marriage, Alice has thus far resisted the temptations of matrimony among the neighboring widowers and pig farmers, more content to enjoy the fruits of her labor—or at least the portion of it her father will share after it is paid to him. Alice spends her days arranging Lady Jemima Alderwick’s blond hair into the latest French styles, chignons and plaits, laundering her lady’s surprisingly malodorous petticoats and drawers, and carefully sewing all manner of fripperies, ribbons, lace, and silk flowers, to her lady’s bonnets and gowns.
But when a visiting servant, a valet named Charlie Wells, catches her eye, Alice begins to understand the constraints of her position. In a ploy to spend time with the object of her affection, Alice attempts to arrange a romance between Lady Jemima Alderwick and Charlie’s employer, one Baronet Sir Nigel Wynstowe. If only they would fall in love—then Alice and Charlie might live together as man and wife! Challenged by Lady Jemima’s love for another and Sir Wynstowe’s eccentric personality, Alice must use all of her cunning to bring about this unlikely romantic union. Will this low-born servant successfully manipulate the hearts of these lords and ladies? Will Charlie and Alice ever improve their stations? Or, as the beginning of women’s suffrage begins to percolate in the drawing rooms and salons of London, will Alice discover a different sort of path for herself?
A deliciously funny, gorgeously detailed, utter enthralling novel, A Perfect Hand is a glorious novel of class, gender, and England on the cusp of enormous change.
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