Wife by Charlotte Mendelson is a beautifully observed and coruscating novel about the joys of passionate love and motherhood, about those left in its wake when passion curdles, and the choices that have to be made when romantic love is no longer enough. When Zoe Stamper meets fellow academic Dr Penny Cartwright at a party, she seems impossibly glamorous to Zoe, who is, after all, several rungs down the academic pecking order - and a nervous ingénue as far as Penny’s sophisticated circle is concerned. But Penny leaves Zoe a cryptic note, and a passionate affair ensues . . . Once Penny confesses all to her live-in lover, Justine, their path is cleared to a life of mutual contentment and marital bliss. But there is something else Penny needs as badly in her life as Zoe's adoration, and thus the beginnng of their affair might also have signalled its end.
Author
Charlotte Mendelson (born 1972) is a British novelist and editor. Her maternal grandparents were, in her words, "Hungarian-speaking-Czech, Ruthenian for about 10 minutes, Carpathian mountain-y, impossible to describe", who left Prague in 1939. When she was two, she moved with her parents and her baby sister to a house in a cobbled passage next to St John's College, Oxford, where her father taught public international law. After the King's School, Canterbury,she studied Ancient and Modern History at the University of Oxford, even though she knows now, with great regret, that what would have suited her best was English literature at somewhere like Leeds. She says she became a lesbian suddenly. "It was boyfriends up to 22 or 23. Not a whiff of lesbianism. Not even a thought. But I'm very all or nothing. It was all that, and now it's all this. There was about a 10-minute cross-over period of uncertainty, but it was really not that bad." She has two children with the journalist and novelist Joanna Briscoe. She won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2003 and the Somerset Maugham Award in 2004 for her second novel Daughters of Jerusalem. She was shortlisted for the Sunday Times 'Young Writer of the Year Award in 2003.She contributes regularly to the TLS, the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday and the Observer. She is an editor at the publishers Headline Review. She was placed 60th on the Independent on Sunday Pink List 2007
