The Country of Marriage - Tapa blanda

‘These stories offer no lists of things to do to improve your marriage overnight. They simply describe what being inside a marriage is like, with elegant and often painful accuracy... Giardina’s prose is full of insights that will make men nod in rueful recognition.’
Brandon Robshaw, Independent

‘These are disturbingly well written stories which manage to be pitiless without being cruel. Giardina has an extraordinary gift for describing the eddies of power in what seem to be familiar relationships. The effect is frightening and, I fear, true.’
David Hare

The many embarrassments of the married man – a Madame Bovary for males.

Want to know what is really going on in your husband’s head? Want to know what his real desires and discontents, never voiced, are? Then here is a user’s manual for wives.

Marriage is a foreign land. Those who visit are always altered, often disoriented and occasionally shattered by the experience.

Many men, bedded down firmly into the wedded state, find themselves in a curious, cosy emotional paralysis – this book describes that paralysis, and married men’s inability to act

Psychologically acute, excruciatingly accurate, bewitchingly well written

A new voice from Updike country