The Ambassador's Wife
  • Published: 31 July 2017
  • ISBN: 9780804171465
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $36.00

The Ambassador's Wife

A Novel

Formats & editions
EBook
28 Jul 2015
Audiobook
28 Jul 2015
Paperback
31 Jul 2017
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Miranda loves the life she has built in the modern-day Middle East, with her infant daughter and ambassador husband, but their idyll is shattered when Miranda is kidnapped and held captive for months, in this debut novel by journalist Jennifer Steil.

From a real-life ambassador's wife and the acclaimed author of Exile Music comes a harrowing novel about the kidnapping of an American woman in the Middle East and the heartbreaking choices she and her husband each must make in the hope of being reunited.

When bohemian artist Miranda meets British ambassador Finn in the ancient stone streets of an Islamic city, the course of her life alters in extraordinary ways. Their marriage gives her the luxury to paint whenever she wants, a staff to wait on her, and a young daughter she adores, but she loses the freedom to wander where she likes and to meet the Muslim women she is secretly teaching to paint. Her husband also makes Miranda a target: One sunny afternoon while hiking in the mountains, she is brutally kidnapped.
 
As Finn struggles to save his family and his career, and Miranda grows close to a stranger’s child in captivity, the secrets he and Miranda have each sought to hide place them and those who trust them in peril. Not even freedom could restore the happiness that once was theirs.
  • Published: 31 July 2017
  • ISBN: 9780804171465
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $36.00
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About the author

Jennifer Steil

Jennifer Steil is the author of The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, a memoir about her experiences running a newspaper in Yemen. She lives in Bolivia, where her husband is the European Union ambassador.

Praise for The Ambassador's Wife

  • "Brilliantly drawn and deeply troubling, Jennifer Steil's The Ambassador's Wife is a novel of love, deception and consequences.... Steil, who is herself an ambassador's wife, skillfully creates Miranda's milieu: the cobblestone streets of the Old City, the pomegranates and bougainvillea in the hot sun, the snippets of Arabic, the complicated people." --The Seattle Times
  • "Beautifully written.... As well as being the wife of an ambassador, protagonist Miranda is also an artist, and descriptions of her artistic life signal Steil as a masterful storyteller from the book's first pages." --Nashville Scene
  • "Thrillingly suspenseful and deeply sensuous.... Steil deftly conducts us into the private and public rooms of the diplomatic world, the complicated aspirations of modern young women living behind the veil, the unfolding of a very private love story--and best of all, into the consciousness of the fiery and idiosyncratic artist who becomes the ambassador's wife. Captivating, unforgettable." --Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander