> Skip to content
Play sample
  • Published: 19 May 2020
  • ISBN: 9781473584976
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 23 hr 26 min
  • Narrator: Kimberly Farr

American Wife

The acclaimed word-of-mouth bestseller




A rich, utterly absorbing, powerful story of how a very ordinary girl from an unremarkable town grows up to become the first lady of the USA.

Brought to you by Penguin

In the year 2000, in the closest election in American history, Alice Blackwell's husband becomes president of the United States. Their time in the White House proves to be heady, tumultuous, and controversial.

But it is Alice's own story - that of a kind, bookish, only child born in the 1940s Midwest who comes to inhabit a life of dizzying wealth and power - that is itself remarkable. Alice candidly describes her small-town upbringing, and the tragedy that shaped her identity; she recalls her early adulthood as a librarian, and her surprising courtship with the man who swept her off her feet; she tells of the crisis that almost ended their marriage; and she confides the privileges and difficulties of being first lady, a role that is uniquely cloistered and public, secretive and exposed.

In Alice Blackwell, Curtis Sittenfeld has created her most dynamic and complex heroine yet. American Wife is not a novel about politics. It is a gorgeously written novel that weaves race, class, fate and wealth into a brilliant tapestry. It is a novel in which the unexpected becomes inevitable, and the pleasures and pain of intimacy and love are laid bare.

(c) Curtis Sittenfeld 2008 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

  • Published: 19 May 2020
  • ISBN: 9781473584976
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 23 hr 26 min
  • Narrator: Kimberly Farr

About the author

Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld pulls no punches in her scathing and hilarious indictments of the American middle classes. Her Sunday Times bestselling novel American Wife was longlisted for the Orange Prize, as was her debut novel Prep. Her other books include The Man of My Dreams, Sisterland, Eligible, the acclaimed short story collection You Think It, I’ll Say It and her latest novel Rodham. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Oprah Magazine and the New York Times magazine. Sittenfeld is also the guest editor for the 2020 Best American Short Stories anthology. She lives with her family in the American Mid-West. Follow her on Twitter @CSittenfeld

Also by Curtis Sittenfeld

See all

Praise for American Wife

Curtis Sittenfeld is an amazing writer, and American Wife is a brave and moving novel about the intersection of private and public life in America. Ambitious and humble at the same time, Sittenfeld refuses to trivialize or simplify people, whether real or imagined.

Richard Russo